- Arm could be considering switching to selling its own chips
- Details of proposed change revealed as part of Qualcomm’s court victory over Arm
- The change in strategy could prove incredibly lucrative for Arm
Semiconductor technology provider Arm, which almost certainly has its hardware somewhere in your company’s smartphone, is known for helping companies make their own processors tailored to mobile devices, but that could soon change with a change debatable towards manufacturing its own chips.
a report of PakGazette analyzes Arm’s so-called “Picasso” project; an attempt to boost revenue by selling its own chips and competing with its own giant customer base, including Qualcomm and Apple, to which it typically sells ready-made Arm intellectual property to help with chip design.
Arm may also be planning to increase royalty rates for those customers.
Arm against Qualcomm soon
Details of the proposed strategy were revealed as part of Qualcomm’s court victory over Arm in a royalty dispute brought and lost by the latter in December 2024.
This would have nominally included Qualcomm, but Arm’s purchase of the new company Nuvia, with the aim of using its technology to produce its own chips, gradually breaking with the previous agreement, led Arm to file a lawsuit in Court in Delaware for failure to comply with the terms of the license.
In the end, however, a jury ruled that Qualcomm’s Nuvia-tech chips were properly licensed and ruled that the company could continue selling them as part of its path into the personal computing and artificial intelligence sectors.
Arm’s future plans to “hose” its customers
Documents filed in those proceedings, which PakGazette says are still sealed in court, reveal that the ‘Picasso’ plan for Arm to sell its own chips (or even “chiplets”) arose at the behest of Arm CEO René Haas, who, even before taking on that role, had generally described the company’s most important customers as “locked in” in an internal Teams message sent in December 2021.
In fact, court evidence suggests that Arm executives had been discussing 300% royalty increases for its customers using Armv9, its latest computing architecture, as early as 2019, in a bid to boost the company’s smartphone revenue. billion-dollar company over the course of a decade.
Ultimately, it is unclear whether this rate increase will occur or be sustained; Using Arm’s computing architecture does not necessarily require your ready-made component drawings.
and how PakGazette As he points out, many of Arm’s biggest customers-turned-competitors could survive without those blueprints and still design their own parts.
