Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon told the company board that purchasing Nuvia outright would save it as much as $1.4 billion per year in payments to Arm. This admission was revealed during the Arm vs. Qualcomm trial, where the former claimed that the Snapdragon X chips the latter released earlier this year were infringing on its patents. According to Reuters, Amon testified that he used this reason to justify the acquisition of Nuvia, which cost Qualcomm $1.4 billion in 2021.
Qualcomm owned a huge share of the smartphone processor market in the late 2010s, yet the company believed it was falling behind Apple’s Bionic chips in terms of performance due to its reliance on Arm designs. Aside from that, Amon wanted to take on Intel’s dominance in laptops and mobile computing. But Qualcomm had no alternative to Arm at that time.
