7 ms·
Qualcomm to Acquire Modular
https://investor.qualcomm.com/news-events/press-releases/news-details/2026/Qualcomm-to-Acquire-Modular/default.aspx https://investor.qualcomm.com/news-events/press-releases/new...
https://www.modular.com/blog/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular https://www.modular.com/blog/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular
https://x.com/clattner_llvm/status/2069769232477192354 https://x.com/clattner_llvm/status/2069769232477192354, https://xcancel.com/clattner_llvm/status/2069769232477192354 https://xcancel.com/clattner_llvm/status/2069769232477192354
- WhereIsTheTruth 3mo agoOf all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip
- afr0ck 3mo agoWhy you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.
- re-thc 3mo ago> Nuvia made a massively great success Not true. Nuvia has had huge delays as part of the acquisition. It resulted in ARM licensing lawsuits and many more and things dragged out.
- refulgentis 3mo agoYes, ARM sued Qualcomm, Qualcomm won, and separately Nuvia has shipped, 2, 3? times now? I don't know how it's a failure or if the delay were "huge" and "dragged out". It's not like it launched an old product or took years and years and years. 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase.
- re-thc 3mo ago> 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase. Yes a world of a difference. That’s competing against an Apple M2 vs M4. You’ve given yourself 2 generations of disadvantage. You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too.
- refulgentis 3mo ago> You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too. If Trump nuked TSMC's production lines the day before M1 went to production, and the production lines came back 3 years later, would Apple ship the M1 on it? Or, the M3? As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1. If it makes 0 sense, why project that idea onto me? When faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. (and read your interlocutor's, "It's not like it launched an old product" obviates your claim that I'd also applaud Intel's delays)
- re-thc 3mo ago> As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1. But that's what happened. Go check the benchmarks. Clearly you haven't. That Snapdragon X that got released (1st gen) was way off the mark. > When faced with a contradiction When faced with a hallucination...
- refulgentis 3mo agoYou switched your claim from "they released the same chip they would have released 3 years earlier and you're stupid for thinking that was a good idea" to "I thought it was slow [because I'm hyperfocused on Apple competition and forgot the perf vs. Intel/AMD]".
- re-thc 3mo agoNothing got switched. Go check the facts. The chip was made. It was delayed due to the lawsuits and drama. The first release was an old chip. Hence slow. All the same. You can slice it how you like. AMD barely has laptop designs (the point here) and Intel is long dead in this space.
- sipjca 3mo agoHasn't pretty much everyone from Nuvia left QC at this point?
- Danox 3mo agoYes, the principal designer engineer Williams just left. He made an announcement a month or two ago?
- bigyabai 3mo agoNvidia wasn't going to buy them. Unless Mojo intended to compete toe-to-toe in the hardware space, they were destined to get bought out by a hardware underdog at some point or another. This is where an industry-spanning consortium would have helped out, but Mojo never really built those inroads with the hardware space. They just expected everyone else to opt-in to their mercurial middleware, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why CUDA is successful.
- roflcopter69 3mo agoTbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language. Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!
- samuell 3mo agoI'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time. Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack? Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.
- samuell 3mo agoMaybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D
- roflcopter69 3mo ago[flagged]
- samuell 3mo agoNo, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.
- melodyogonna 3mo agoRelated, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing-deal-ai-chip-startup-modular-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...
- nylonstrung 3mo agoI call BS, zero chance this traded at $4B. The fact they describe it as a "chip company" shouldn't give confidence
- simplyvibecode 3mo agoWired said ~$4B as well and linked the 8-k with the stock amount involved in the deal - based on some simple math of price at market open for the announcement + number of shares, it's directionally accurate.
- melodyogonna 3mo agoQualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.
- bobajeff 3mo agoIt's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks. * https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9-why-do-hw-companies-struggle-to-build-ai-software https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...
- surajrmal 3mo agoCould be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.
- ivell 3mo agoStill the result could be that the software performance much better on their hardware than others. Priorities, competition, etc.
- pjmlp 3mo agoPatents, and tooling portfolio.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[dead]
- bit_economist 3mo agoIt's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.
- cocoflunchy 3mo agoIt's the first sentence of the article? "an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion"
- samuell 3mo agoAs a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.
- revengerwizard 3mo agoOh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.
- ssivark 3mo agoQualcomm seems to be assembling a whole portfolio of technologies/products aimed at 1. Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V 2. Being competitive for AI/could needs instai of just chips for phones and other edge devices. Interesting to see bold and high-conviction moves in this direction. Tenstorrent, Modular, Ventana, Alphawave, etc.
- MobiusHorizons 3mo ago> Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V The reason to move away from arm has nothing to do with performance, but rather avoiding licensing snafus like happened with their laptop chips. So far no one has delivered a risc-v core with class leading performance outside of the really low end. Not saying it can’t be done, but it will likely be a step back at first.
- toxicdevil 3mo agoI'm not a hardware specialist. Qualcomm already has their custom CPU core. Can't they just switch out the frontend (fetch/decode) with RISCV and the rest shouldn't be a be big problem?
- monkeydust 3mo agoWhats peoples thoughts on Tenstorrent - they were looking for funding on Hiive recently but that deal got pulled when Qualcomm rumours surface a week or so ago.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- semiinfinitely 3mo agolatty gotta get his baggy
- levodelellis 3mo ago[flagged]
- YuechenLi 3mo agoI honestly think Mojo would be better served if it is just a high-level language for GPU programming that compiles down to PTX with clear Python/Rust interop boundaries instead of trying for the "one language, multiple computational model" thing that they seem to be going for. The programming model between CPU and GPU programming is very different: code that runs best on CPU with heavy branching behaviors should not be written the same way as massively parallel matrix multiplication oriented GPU code, which I think they will be forced to do in the MLIR level anyway. So, you end up with a language that looks like Python, but doesn't behave like Python, and companies that adopt Mojo early with the promise of Python compatibility may find themselves running into edge cases with difficult to trace compiler error messages that would be nearly impossible to debug, especially with the addition of Zig style `comptime` as their metaprogramming model.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dwa3592 3mo agoHas anyone used mojo/modular extensively in their work? I installed it as soon as it was available but never went past the toy examples.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoI have a friend who is doing stuff with it, and he's incredibly excited about it, which is definitely a good sign. I was really excited about it at launch, but its proprietary nature put me off.
- amoshebb 3mo agoI tried, also all a little while ago, really found the puzzles fun to do and then tried to implement some basic radar pipeline things and found lots of just basic 'building blocks' for signal processing (i/o things, fft) were missing to the point I went back to JAX. I'm still not manage memory on GPU the way I would like, but mojo (or, my ignorant first stab at it) did not let me exploit direct DMA type things anyway.
- maxloh 3mo agoI don't get it. Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market. The industry standard is the NVIDIA Hopper H100/H200. What could they possibly get from acquiring Modular?
- mathisfun123 3mo agoYou've never heard of an acquihire?
- osigurdson 3mo agoI don't think $4B is reasonable for an acquihire. They must see value in the technology.
- mathisfun123 3mo agoIt's an all stock deal. No cash. With undoubtedly a very healthy earn out. > They must see value in the technology. What value? Mojo doesn't currently support any of Qualcomm's GPUs.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoExactly. If they can buy this talent to make their GPUs more valuable, then this deal makes sense. I'm actually a little happier about this deal than expected as it means the language may actually become open source.
- fvrghl 3mo agoI have a friend who works at Modular. FWIU, the employees got shafted by the acquisition financially.
- mathisfun123 3mo agoYes I know multiple people there as well and heard the same thing.
- fishgoesblub 3mo agoWelp, I think I can give up on my hope for Mojo.
- markkitti 3mo agoYesterday, LineShine a supercomputer in China emerges as #1 in the Top500 using ARM v9 based chips and no GPUs. Today, Qualcomm a premier designer of ARMv9 licensed chips in the United States acquires Modular, who has been creating a compiler stack that provides an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA stack. Are you ready for Qualcomm ARMv9 powered inference running Mojo/MAX written kernels doing low-cost inference at scale for AI?
- moscoe 3mo agoEither this was the plan all along (cashing in on the bubble) or it’s an admission of failure.
- bwfan123 3mo agoMojo seemed like a passion project. The fundamental problem was never the lack of a great programming language, and inventing a python bastard child of a language is not a solution. But, respect and congrats to the Modular folks. HW companies have notoriously bad software teams and culture and hopefully this injects some good sw dna into the acquirer.
- fancyfredbot 3mo agoModular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform. After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad. Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time learning mojo in the hope it might actually become cross platform.
- ipsum2 3mo agoThe best cross-platform API is CUDA, because we have ROCm.
- pjmlp 3mo agoOnly superficially, given what CUDA provides and what ROCm supports.
- pjmlp 3mo agoThe competition to CUDA and proprietary 3D APIs always overlooks developer productivity. For some strange reason there is this expectation, maybe due to UNIX background of those folks, that portable APIs have to exist without good IDE tooling, no graphical debuggers, no high level programming models, no libraries ecosystem. Then for some "strange" reason, GPU developers mostly pick proprietary and the cycle repeats itself.
- melodyogonna 3mo agoBut the Modular stack is focused on developer productivity. It is still early but there has been substantial work on all these
- pjmlp 3mo agoI am yet to see the same Windows love as CUDA. Same to IDE integration and graphical debugging experience for GPU code. Until now, it was been the usual UNIX cli, and text mode lldb like debugging for CPU side. At least it what I have been made aware of.
- totalperspectiv 3mo agoPer modular Twitter, the plan is still to open source the mojo compiler this year: https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635 https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635
- mlazos 3mo agoWtf? What a joke, but I mean the best way to become a billionaire is convince someone with a billion dollars to give it to you. This is actually insane, wow. I guess Qualcomm is desperate? Nobody was bidding for this, but congrats to the team at modular?! I’m actually salty about this because like I don’t feel like mojo was even good after trying it out.
- vshulcz 3mo ago[flagged]
- cisrockandroll 3mo agoRIP Modular
- carterschonwald 3mo agoso the most notoriously patent oriented tech firm is buying this up. lol ;) good for the founders. also explains why my resume got dropped on the floor as a desk reject :p
- Danox 3mo agoThat patent orientation is why it probably won’t go anywhere.
- fadenjfbc 3mo ago[dead]