Qualcomm has agreed to purchase Nuvia for approximately $1.4 billion. The news is music to the ears of Qualcomm’s various partners. Samsung, Sony, OnePlus, LG, and others, with products spanning smartphones to smart car systems, have issued supportive statements. This could be one of the most significant tech acquisitions of the year.
But why is Nuvia joining Qualcomm such a big deal? The short version is that the deal sees Qualcomm return to custom CPU designs based on the Arm architecture. This has wide-ranging implications for Qualcomm’s silicon portfolio, from high-performance servers to energy-efficient smartphones. However, there’s much more to the story than that.