Qualcomm Nears Acquisition of Modular for Nearly $4 Billion

Qualcomm is nearing a deal to acquire AI chip software startup Modular for nearly $4 billion, according to reports.

Qualcomm would pay with stock and cash incentives. The reported acquisition includes the issuance of up to 19.2 million shares of Qualcomm common stock, valued at just under $4 billion based on the company's last closing share price. It also would set aside $300 million for Modular employees. The transaction is targeting a close in the second half of 2026.

Modular's entire team would join Qualcomm. The startup's roughly 150 employees, including cofounders Chris Lattner and Tim Davis, are expected to move over as part of the deal. Modular was founded in 2022 by Lattner and Davis, both of whom previously worked on Google's TPU chips.

The startup built a platform for portable AI code. Modular developed a chip software platform and a proprietary coding language that lets developers write AI software capable of running across different chips without rewriting code for each one. Its goal was to create a unifying software layer to maximize performance from GPUs and CPUs while challenging systems such as Nvidia's CUDA and AMD's ROCm.

The reported purchase would advance Qualcomm's AI expansion plans. Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon said in a statement that the company believes the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in AI deployment. The deal comes nine months after Modular raised $250 million at a $1.6 billion valuation.

Qualcomm is pushing beyond mobile into data centers and AI devices. The company generates the vast majority of its revenue from mobile chips but has been working on 40 different chip designs for AI gadgets including smart glasses, jewelry, earbuds, pins, and watches. Late last year it acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a startup building server CPUs based on RISC-V, and is developing custom ASICs for data centers with ByteDance reported as an early customer.