Sources familiar with the matter disclosed that chip giant Qualcomm Inc. is holding advanced negotiations to acquire artificial intelligence chip startup Modular Inc., with the proposed deal valued at approximately $4 billion. According to people briefed on the talks, an official announcement may be made in the coming weeks, though negotiations could still fall through or see revised terms. Up to this point, a Qualcomm spokesperson declined to comment, while representatives from Modular were not immediately available for a response.
The planned acquisition stands as one of the flagship initiatives spearheaded by Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to expand the company’s footprint in the AI data center market. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon commented: “Buying Modular would accelerate Qualcomm’s AI roadmap by several years and fill a critical gap in its product portfolio.”
Should the transaction close at the $4 billion valuation, it would mark a massive financial jump for Modular. The startup was valued at only $1.6 billion when it secured its previous financing round just nine months earlier.
Founded in Silicon Valley in 2022 by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis, who first met while working at Google, Modular was established out of frustration with fragmented AI infrastructure. Lattner is a prominent figure in programming language development and previously led the creation of the Swift programming language.
One of Modular’s flagship offerings is the MAX AI inference engine, engineered to deliver the world’s fastest unified AI execution performance and enable high-performance, portable computing across a diverse range of hardware platforms. The platform allows developers to deploy AI models seamlessly across different computing architectures without rewriting underlying code.
In September 2025, Modular raised $250 million at a $1.6 billion valuation, bringing its total capital raised to $380 million. Its investor roster includes DFJ Growth, Factory, General Catalyst, Google Ventures, Greylock Partners and the U.S. Innovation Technology Fund, among others.
Earlier this month, separate reports emerged stating Qualcomm was engaged in intensive acquisition talks with another AI chip startup Tenstorrent for a potential deal valued between $8 billion and $10 billion. Founded by renowned chip architect Jim Keller, Tenstorrent develops AI training and inference accelerators built on the RISC-V architecture with comprehensive end-to-end software and hardware stack capabilities.
If both proposed acquisitions are successfully completed, Qualcomm will deploy nearly $14 billion within a matter of weeks to build out a full-stack AI chip lineup spanning interconnects, inference and training workloads, positioning it as a direct rival to NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
The AI chip sector has evolved into the central battleground of the semiconductor industry. NVIDIA dominates the data center space underpinned by its CUDA software ecosystem and GPU accelerators; AMD is gaining traction with its MI300 accelerator family, while Intel is aggressively promoting its Gaudi line of AI processors. Qualcomm’s entry into data center-grade AI chips via purchases of Modular and Tenstorrent would introduce major new dynamics to the competitive landscape.
Nevertheless, given the strategic importance of AI chip technology and national security sensitivities surrounding semiconductor intellectual property, both transactions may be subject to rigorous regulatory scrutiny.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）