Qualcomm acquires Silicon Valley chip company Modular For nearly $4 billion.
They announced their merger on Wednesday. Qualcomm said The company expects up to 19,2 millions shares to be issued in the transaction, or just below $4 billion at the last share closing price. This deal is nine months after the startup chip company was founded. raised $250 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. This is anticipated to happen in the latter half of 2018.
Modular produces and sells chip software platforms. Modular also has a proprietary code language which allows software developers to create AI applications that can run on a variety of chips without having the need to modify their codes for every chip. Qualcomm will be acquiring the startup’s team. This includes two of its co-founders as well as around 150 other employees.
“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,” Cristiano Amon, the CEO and president of Qualcomm, said in a statement.
This deal shows Qualcomm’s ambition to grow beyond the chips that power mobile devices, which account for the majority of its revenues. Amon recently said The company has worked on forty different chip designs to power AI gadgets such as jewelry, smart watches, earrings, pins and watches. Qualcomm also has been pushing hard into the market for data centers, where more powerful processors are needed.
In late 2017, the company purchased Ventana Micro Systems. The startup was focused on developing server CPUs using RISC-V technology. RISC-V, an open-standard chip architecture. China’s ByteDance has been reported as working with the company on ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) designs for datacenters. an early customer.
Modular, founded by Chris Lattner in 2022 and Tim Davis. They both worked at Google before starting their own business. Lattner has had a storied career. Before joining Google, he built Apple’s Swift language and the LLVM open-source project. Lattner also served briefly as the director of Tesla Autopilot. Later, Andrej Karpathy (famous AI researcher, recently hired by Anthropic) took over the role.
Lattner wanted to build a software layer which would help cloud-based businesses get the most out of their GPUs and CPUs. told WIRED In a profile that was published in the past year, Modular took on Nvidia’s CUDA software system for GPUs. Modular was challenging Nvidia’s CUDA software, a closed system designed for GPUs. AMD’s ROCm is also open source but difficult to adapt to other chips.
Modular found itself in an awkward position. It was able to secure partnerships with the big chipmakers and hyperscalers, such as Amazon.com and Apple.com, but it had to compete with both of them, their in-house software, and with other companies.
Lattner at the time said that he thought he and Davis had to solve a complex software problem outside of Big Tech because they were not familiar with it. “structural.” In the end, Qualcomm’s structure won.
