Qualcomm Acquires High-Profile Chip Company Modular for Almost $4 Billion

Qualcomm is set to acquire the Silicon Valley chip startup Modular for approximately $4 billion.

The acquisition was announced on Wednesday; Qualcomm indicated it plans to issue up to 19.2 million shares of common stock as part of the agreement, totaling just under $4 billion based on the latest closing stock price. This move comes nine months after Modular secured $250 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. The deal is anticipated to finalize in the latter half of this year.

Modular develops and sells a chip software platform. The company also offers a proprietary coding language that enables developers to create AI software that can operate on various chips without the need to rewrite the code for each one. The startup’s full team, including its two cofounders and about 150 employees, is expected to join Qualcomm.

“We believe the future is about developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can operate across various computing environments and provide customers genuine choice in AI deployment,” said Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon in a statement.

This acquisition highlights Qualcomm’s increasing ambition to broaden its scope beyond the mobile device chip market, which generates the majority of its revenue. Amon recently mentioned that the company is developing 40 different chip designs for AI devices, such as smart glasses, jewelry, earbuds, pins, and watches. Moreover, Qualcomm is making significant strides into the data center market, which demands more powerful chips.

Last year, the company acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a startup dedicated to creating server CPUs based on RISC-V, an open-standard chip architecture. Qualcomm is also pursuing custom ASIC designs, specifically for data centers, with China’s ByteDance reportedly being an early client.

Modular was established in 2022 by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis, both of whom worked on Google’s TPU chips before founding their own startup. During their time at Google, Davis co-created TensorFlow Lite, a lightweight version of TensorFlow designed to run machine learning models on devices with limited computing resources. Lattner, prior to Google, is known for creating the open-source compiler infrastructure project LLVM and Apple’s Swift programming language. He briefly led Tesla’s Autopilot software program, a role later assumed by renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who recently joined Anthropic.

“What sets this team apart is the complementary dynamic between Chris and Tim,” remarks Dave Munichiello, a managing partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures), an early investor in Modular. “Chris is truly exceptional—bold, visionary, and technically uncompromising.”

Lattner and Davis aimed to establish a cohesive software layer that maximizes the efficiency of GPUs and CPUs for cloud businesses. In doing so, Modular directly challenged Nvidia’s CUDA, a proprietary software system for GPUs, and AMD’s ROCm, which, while open-source, is not always user-friendly for porting to different chips.

This posed a unique challenge for Modular, as it formed partnerships with major chip manufacturers and hyper-scalers such as Amazon and Apple while simultaneously competing against them, along with their in-house developed software.

Lattner previously stated a belief that he and Davis were addressing a software issue that needed resolution outside of a Big Tech framework because it was fundamentally “structural.” Ultimately, Qualcomm’s structure prevailed.

Update 2:50 pm EST, 6/24/2026: This article has been updated to provide further details about the founders of Modular and to include a quote from one of the company’s early investors.