Qualcomm-Arm Jury Fails to Reach Verdict

Karen Dunn put the dependency before the jury. Qualcomm, the San Diego company that designs mobile processors and semiconductors for smartphones and smart devices, builds its Snapdragon chips on technology it licenses from Arm. Arm Holdings, headquartered in Cambridge, England, designs the central processing unit cores and the instruction-set architecture that chipmakers license; processors built to those designs sit in virtually every modern smartphone. Dunn told the jurors the relationship was not optional.

“It’s really bad because Qualcomm’s entire chip business depends on Arm and on Arm honoring its contract and honoring its promises,” she said.

Qualcomm’s architecture license gives it the right to design custom cores that conform to Arm’s standards, and that license is the ground the chip business stands on. Across the aisle, Gregg LoCascio rejected the injury claim outright. Where Dunn had fixed the jury on dependence, he fixed it on absence of damage. Qualcomm, he told them, had not been hurt by anything in the complaint.

“They were not harmed in the least,” LoCascio said.

Arm’s frame was deliberate. The suit, in its telling, was not proof of breach or loss but leverage in a fight over licensing terms—an attempt to force better conditions rather than a showing of real commercial injury. The two openings sat against each other in the Wilmington courtroom: one company saying its entire chip business rested on the other keeping its word, the other saying no harm had occurred at all.

This was the second trial in two years between the companies. SoftBank Group acquired control of Arm in 2016. After SoftBank took control, the business relationship deteriorated. Arm moved beyond licensing the designs chipmakers needed and began selling chips of its own. A commercial tie built on architecture licenses produced two federal trials in two years, both in Wilmington, both before Judge Maryellen Noreika, both with Arm CEO Rene Haas and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon under oath. Haas and Amon took the stand over the five days of testimony; Noreika oversaw the proceedings as she had the earlier trial.

The jury began deliberating Friday morning. Qualcomm asked the jurors to find breaches of the licensing agreements that underpinned its chip designs. The first was that Arm had withheld software patches and design tools—the code fixes and testing instruments a licensee needs to finish and certify processors built on the architecture. Without them, designs stall short of production. The second was a pricing claim: Arm had violated a clause written in the style of a most-favored-nation provision, one meant to keep Qualcomm’s payments within 10 percent of Arm’s lowest price for comparable processor designs. The third turned on a single document. In 2024 Arm sent Qualcomm a letter notifying it that it was allegedly in breach of a key license; Qualcomm said Arm then leaked that letter to Bloomberg, and the disclosure damaged Qualcomm’s dealings with Meta Platforms.

The Meta deal’s value was allegedly reduced by $170 million.

Qualcomm’s license for Arm’s computing architecture runs until 2033. That remaining term stretched nearly a decade forward, so the jury’s answers on the three claims would shape how the two companies dealt with each other long after the Wilmington trial closed.

One more request sat with Noreika alone. Before the trial opened, Qualcomm asked her for a pre-trial ruling on a clause in the licensing agreements. If Arm had breached those agreements, the clause would let Qualcomm stop paying royalties for five years. A royalty is the recurring payment a licensee makes for the right to use the licensed architecture in its chips. Noreika has not ruled. Arm argues the five-year royalty-suspension clause is unenforceable. That question never went to the jury. Even a finding that Arm had broken the contracts would leave undecided whether Qualcomm could freeze those payments for five years. The penalty stayed with the court.

The same week, before the same judge, a separate bench trial examined whether Arm negotiated in good faith over pricing terms for its next-generation v10 architecture. That proceeding sat on a parallel track. A decision on good-faith bargaining for the v10 terms could arrive well after the jury finished.

The jury deliberated about four hours on Friday and recessed without a verdict. The claims remained unsettled. The panel left with no finding returned.