Gerard Williams III put it at one percent or less. That is how much of Arm’s own design work he said survived into Oryon, the CPU core his team built and Qualcomm now ships in every Snapdragon worth caring about. Arm spent three years and a Delaware courtroom trying to prove that one percent was worth a completely different royalty, and last autumn it lost the argument outright. Within a day it filed an appeal.

Qualcomm runs the most feared patent-licensing operation in mobile, the one that collects a royalty on close to every smartphone sold whether or not a Qualcomm chip is inside. So there is something almost funny about watching it spend three years stuck on the wrong end of somebody else’s license terms, told that the cores in its most important new product line were never properly paid for. This is the licensing war where Qualcomm was the one getting squeezed, and I find it more revealing than the royalty machine, because here Qualcomm did not get to write the rules.

Nuvia came out of stealth in 2019, started by engineers who had built Apple’s A-series silicon, Williams among them as the lead CPU architect. The plan was a from-scratch server core, codenamed Phoenix, designed on an Arm architecture license. Qualcomm bought the company in January 2021 for 1.4 billion dollars, and Phoenix quietly became Oryon, the custom CPU that finally gave Snapdragon a real answer to Apple Silicon.

Oryon was never going to live in one product. It launched in the Snapdragon X Elite laptop chips, dropped into the Snapdragon 8 Elite for flagship phones as two big cores sitting over a stack of smaller ones, moved into automotive, and now sits under the data-center parts Qualcomm is pointing at rack-scale servers. Every one of those rests on the same claim being true, that Qualcomm already held the right to build custom cores off Arm’s instruction set on the terms it had. That claim is exactly what Arm set out to break.

Arm licenses two ways. An architecture license lets you design your own cores from its instruction set, the hard and expensive path that Apple and Nuvia took. A technology license just lets you ship Arm’s ready-made Cortex designs. Nuvia held the architecture kind, signed on the favorable terms a startup gets. Arm’s position was that this license, startup pricing included, could not simply ride through an acquisition into Qualcomm’s hands, that Qualcomm’s own architecture license did not stretch to cover Nuvia-derived designs, and that Oryon therefore needed a fresh agreement written on Arm’s terms.

Take the contract language away, and the fight was about money and control, mostly control. Arm wanted Oryon re-licensed at a higher rate, but the bigger prize was the principle that buying a custom-core startup forces a renegotiation, which would hand Arm leverage over any licensee that ever changes hands. What gives the game away is the run-up to the December 2024 trial, when Arm moved to cancel Qualcomm’s architecture license outright, a 60-day notice that would have blocked Snapdragon X from shipping at all if it had held. You do not reach for the kill switch over one percent of design work. You reach for it once you have decided a licensee has gotten too good at not needing you.

The jury did not buy it. In December 2024, a Delaware jury found that Qualcomm had not breached the Nuvia license and that the Nuvia-derived cores were licensed under Qualcomm’s own agreement. It deadlocked on one narrow point, whether Nuvia itself had breached its original license before the acquisition, and that single question went to a mistrial. Arm dropped its attempt to terminate Qualcomm’s license a couple of months later. In September 2025, the judge closed the rest, entering final judgment for Qualcomm, ruling as a matter of law that Nuvia had not breached either, and throwing out Arm’s last claim along with its request for a do-over.

Within a day, Arm filed a notice of appeal to the Third Circuit, where it still sits. And this was never a single lawsuit. Qualcomm has its own case running against Arm, filed in April 2024, accusing Arm of withholding deliverables it owes under their license and of pushing the whole ecosystem toward Arm’s pre-packaged cores to feed a business Arm increasingly wants for itself: designing and selling finished chips, in direct competition with the licensees who fund it. Qualcomm amended that complaint on the last day of March this year, Arm moved to strike the new claim, and the trial is now set for the fourth quarter of 2026 instead of the spring date everyone kept repeating. And Qualcomm is roughly nine percent of Arm’s revenue, which is what makes it strange: a supplier suing a customer that large while the customer sues back.

That is why the ruling matters to companies that will never ship a Snapdragon. Anyone building custom cores on Arm, Apple and Nvidia’s Grace line and Ampere and whatever MediaTek is planning now has a data point that an acquisition does not automatically hand Arm a renegotiation and a fatter bill. The deeper question the December verdict never touched, whether Arm gets to compete head-on with its own licensees while still setting their terms, is the one going to trial, and it is the one that decides how safe it actually is to build on Arm at all.

My read is that the one-percent figure was always a distraction. The fight was never about how much Arm design survived inside Oryon. It was about whether Arm gets to decide which of its licensees are allowed to be excellent, and Qualcomm just made the answer no, at least until the appeal says otherwise. What tells you where Qualcomm’s head is at is that it is not waiting to find out. It has been buying its way toward not needing an incumbent’s moat at all, and the RISC-V hedging sitting underneath Snapdragon is the thread I am leaving alone here, because the real question, what it would actually cost Qualcomm to walk away from Arm, deserves its own post. What I will say is that a company does not win a three-year license war this cleanly and then keep eyeing the exit unless it already knows how the sequel ends.

Sources

  • Qualcomm, “Qualcomm Achieves Complete Victory Over Arm in Litigation Challenging Licensing Agreements,” Oct 1, 2025 — investor.qualcomm.com
  • Qualcomm Incorporated, Form 10-Q (FY2026), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — sec.gov
  • Arm Holdings plc, Form 20-F (FY2026), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (appeal pending, March 30, 2026 amended complaint, Q4 2026 trial, Qualcomm at 9% of revenue) — sec.gov
  • Tom’s Hardware, coverage of the ruling and Gerard Williams III’s “one percent or less” figure — tomshardware.com
  • The Register, “Judge dismisses Arm’s last legal claim against Qualcomm,” Oct 1, 2025 — theregister.com
  • DataCenterDynamics, “Delaware judge rules in favor of Qualcomm and Nuvia in licensing dispute with Arm” (60-day cancellation notice, appeal) — datacenterdynamics.com