Qualcomm announced in June 2026 that it will acquire Silicon Valley chip software startup Modular for nearly $4 billion. Qualcomm said it expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares of common stock to complete the deal, which is expected to close in the second half of the year.
The acquisition includes $300 million set aside for Modular employees. Modular’s entire team — roughly 150 employees plus its two cofounders — are expected to join Qualcomm. The deal comes nine months after Modular raised $250 million at a $1.6 billion valuation.
Modular was founded in 2022 by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis, both former Google TPU chip engineers. The startup builds a chip software platform and a proprietary coding language that allows developers to write AI software capable of running across different chips without rewriting code for each one. That approach positioned Modular as a challenger to Nvidia’s CUDA and AMD’s ROCm, while also securing partnerships with those companies, as well as with hyperscalers like Amazon and Apple.
Lattner is also known for building the open source compiler project LLVM and Apple’s Swift programming language, and for a brief stint leading Tesla’s Autopilot software program.
For Qualcomm, the acquisition signals a push beyond its core mobile device chip business, which generates the vast majority of its revenues. The company has been expanding into data centers and AI hardware, including custom ASIC chip designs — with China’s ByteDance reported as an early customer — and last year acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a startup focused on RISC-V server CPUs.
“We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI,” Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon said in a statement.
The deal may strengthen Qualcomm’s position as it competes for AI workloads across devices and data centers, giving it a software layer designed to run across multiple chip architectures.
Source: WIRED