Qualcomm Buys Buzzy Chip Startup Modular for Nearly $4 Billion

Qualcomm volition get the Silicon Valley spot startup Modular for astir $4 billion.

The companies announced the acquisition connected Wednesday; Qualcomm said it expects to contented up to 19.2 cardinal shares of communal banal successful the deal, which works retired to conscionable nether $4 cardinal based connected the company's past closing stock price.

The deal, which includes $300 cardinal for Modular employees, comes 9 months aft the spot startup raised $250 cardinal astatine a $1.6 cardinal valuation. It’s expected to adjacent successful the 2nd fractional of this year.

Modular makes and sells a spot bundle platform. It besides produces a proprietary coding connection that allows developers to constitute AI bundle to tally connected antithetic chips without having to rewrite the codification for each chip. The startup’s full team, which includes its 2 cofounders and astir 150 employees, are expected to articulation Qualcomm.

“We judge the aboriginal belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that tin tally crossed divers compute environments and springiness customers existent prime successful however and wherever they deploy AI,” said Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon successful a statement.

The woody signals Qualcomm’s increasing ambitions to grow beyond chips for the mobile instrumentality market, which make the immense bulk of the company’s revenues. Amon recently said the institution has been moving connected 40 antithetic spot designs for AI gadgets, including astute glasses, jewelry, earbuds, pins, and watches. But Qualcomm has besides been making a large propulsion into the information halfway market, which requires much almighty chips.

Late past year, the institution acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a startup focused connected gathering server CPUs based connected RISC-V, an open-standard spot architecture. It’s besides moving connected customized ASIC designs, oregon application-specific integrated circuits, for information centers, with China’s ByteDance reported to beryllium an aboriginal customer.

Modular was founded successful 2022 by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis.Both worked connected Google’s TPU chips earlier leaving to motorboat their ain company. Lattner’s vocation anterior to Google is simply a storied one: He built the unfastened root compiler infrastructure task LLVM, arsenic good arsenic Apple’s Swift programming language. Lattner was besides concisely the caput of Tesla’s Autopilot bundle program. (Famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who precocious joined Anthropic, aboriginal took that role.)

Lattner and Davis wanted to make a unifying bundle furniture that helps unreality businesses compression arsenic overmuch foodstuff arsenic imaginable retired of GPUs and CPUs, Lattner told WIRED successful a illustration published past year. In doing so, Modular challenged Nvidia’s CUDA, a closed bundle strategy for GPUs, and AMD’s ROCm, which is open-source but not ever casual to larboard to different chips.

This enactment Modular successful a tricky position: It yet secured partnerships with those large chipmakers, arsenic good arsenic with hyperscalers similar Amazon and adjacent with Apple, portion simultaneously competing with them and the bundle they developed in-house.

At the time, Lattner said helium believed that helium and Davis were tackling a bundle occupation that had to beryllium solved extracurricular of a Big Tech environment, due to the fact that it was “structural.” Ultimately, the operation of Qualcomm won out.