- Arm could consider moving to sell its own chips
- Details of the proposed change revealed as part of Qualcomm’s court victory over Arm
- The change in strategy could prove incredibly lucrative for Arm
Semiconductor technology supplier Arm, which almost certainly has its hardware somewhere in your business smartphone, is known for helping companies make their own mobile-friendly processors, but that could soon change with a contemplated shift to making its own chips.
A report from Pakinomist discusses Arm’s so-called “Picasso” project; a bid to boost revenue by selling its own chips and compete with its own juggernaut customer base — including Qualcomm and Apple — to which it usually sells off-the-shelf Arm intellectual property to help with chip design.
Arm may also plan to raise royalty rates for these customers.
Arm v Qualcomm in brief
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 startup Nuvia, to use its technology to produce its own chips, gradually disengaged from the previous agreement, led Arm to file a complaint in US federal court in Delaware over a breach of license terms.
Ultimately, however, a jury ruled that Qualcomm’s Nuvia-tech chips were properly licensed and decided that the company could continue to sell them as part of its route into the personal computing and AI sectors.
Arm’s future plans to “snake” its customers
Filings in those cases, which Pakinomist claims are still under court seal, reveal that the ‘Picasso’ plan for Arm to sell its own chips (or indeed “chiplets”) came at the behest of Arm CEO Rene Haas, who, before he even assumed that role, had generally described the company’s biggest customers as “hosed” in an internal Teams message sent in December 2021.
Indeed, court evidence suggests that Arm executives had discussed 300% royalty increases for its customers using Armv9 — its latest computing architecture — as far back as 2019 in an effort to boost the company’s smartphone revenue by $1 billion in over the course of a decade.
It is ultimately unclear whether this rate increase will happen or even stick; use of Arm’s computer architecture does not necessarily require its finished component plans.
And as Pakinomist points out that many of Arm’s biggest customer-facing competitors could survive without these blueprints and still design their own parts.
