Qualcomm's big win over Arm could reverberate throughout the industry — ALA licensees could potentially develop custom designs without renegotiating terms

This week, Qualcomm secured a final legal win against Arm in a high-profile licensing dispute around CPU cores developed by Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired in 2021. A U.S. District Court has now rejected all of Arm's claims, affirming Qualcomm's right to use Nuvia's technology under its architecture license agreement (ALA). Arm then revoked Qualcomm's ALA in October 2024, citing a violation of the agreement for not renegotiating it after acquiring Nuvia. If Qualcomm can freely use Nuvia's custom Arm v8 cores across segments under an existing ALA, it would theoretically enable other licensees to do the same thing. In particular, under a standard ALA license with Arm, licensees can design their own CPU microarchitecture from scratch that runs a specific Arm ISA (e.g.