Qualcomm has agreed to acquire Modular Inc., the AI software infrastructure startup co-founded by Chris Lattner, in a deal Bloomberg and Reuters have valued at roughly $4 billion. The two companies announced the transaction on June 25; Qualcomm did not publicly disclose a price. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
What Modular builds
Founded in 2022, Modular’s core product is an AI-native software stack that lets developers write deployment code once and run it across CPUs, GPUs, neural processing units (NPUs), and custom chip architectures without porting. Its two best-known projects are the MAX inference platform and the Mojo programming language — a Python-compatible language designed for high-performance AI workloads.
Lattner is widely known in the technology industry as the creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language, both built during his time at Apple. He co-founded Modular with Tim Davis after the two departed Google. Before the acquisition, the company had raised approximately $380 million in total funding, including a $250 million round in September 2025 that valued it at $1.6 billion.
Why Qualcomm is buying
Qualcomm has long dominated smartphone chip markets through its Snapdragon line and has been pushing into AI data center hardware with its Dragonfly chip family. What it lacked was a software layer making it straightforward for developers to deploy AI on Qualcomm silicon alongside GPUs and other accelerators.
“This acquisition marks a pivotal moment not just for Qualcomm, but for the AI industry,” CEO Cristiano Amon said in the announcement. “The future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments.”
Lattner echoed that framing: “Joining Qualcomm gives us the scale and platform reach to accelerate that mission. Together, we can make AI development more accessible and performant.”