Dive Brief:
- Qualcomm has struck a deal to acquire software infrastructure firm Modular for roughly $3.9 billion in an effort to spur adoption of its edge-to-cloud artificial intelligence platforms.
- According to a securities filing, under the agreement, Qualcomm will issue up to 19.2 million shares of its common stock to the equity owners of Modular.
- The deal will help Qualcomm “deliver a silicon-agnostic compute layer across devices, edge and data centers,” the company said. It added that this will improve semiconductor performance, increase hardware flexibility and otherwise allow for more efficient AI deployment.
Dive Insight:
The planned acquisition follows Qualcomm’s agreement last year to purchase Alphawave Semi for $2.4 billion, with the goal of better positioning itself for the AI and data center boom. Along the same lines, its acquisition of Modular reportedly will help it compete with Nvidia in meeting increasing AI demand, Reuters reported.
“As AI scales, efficiency, not capability, becomes a constraint,” Qualcomm said in the press release. “Performance-per-watt drives the cost of inference, and cost determines what scales.”
According to Qualcomm, in addition to better hardware, meeting demand for AI will require software that “connects system-level optimization with heterogeneous, disaggregated compute, turning silicon performance into reliable and efficient AI services across accelerators, environments, and use cases.”
Modular provides an open, AI-native software platform that allows AI to run efficiently using a variety of hardware, Qualcomm said.
“For developers and enterprises, that means building once, deploying across any environment with lower total cost of ownership,” the company said. “Modular is supported by an open, industry-friendly, vendor-neutral developer community committed to improving the portability and efficiency of AI infrastructure.”
In addition to helping Qualcomm “deliver a more optimized AI compute layer across a broad range of platforms and use cases,” the company said the deal will also enhance its data center strategy, make AI system deployment more efficient and strengthen its relationships with model creators, developers, hyperscalers and enterprises.
The agreement also will provide Qualcomm with access to additional data centers and position it to “drive the global expansion of data center and edge AI compute,” according to the press release.
“As agentic AI scales across data centers and edge environments, the industry is moving toward disaggregated, multi-vendor architectures that demand a more open and modern software foundation,” Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon said in a statement.
“We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI,” Amon said. “With Modular, we’re accelerating that shift, combining our scale and energy-efficient data center technologies with an open ecosystem approach to help drive the next chapter of AI.”
