Qualcomm is in advanced negotiations to acquire Modular Inc., the AI infrastructure software startup, as part of a broader effort to bolster its data center ambitions with purpose-built artificial intelligence tools. The deal values Modular at approximately $4 billion, a steep premium over the $1.6 billion valuation the company carried after its September 2025 funding round. The acquisition has not been confirmed, with Qualcomm refusing to comment.
Modular was founded in 2022 by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis, both former Google engineers. Lattner created LLVM and Swift, two foundational technologies that power enormous swaths of modern computing.
The startup built an AI inference platform designed to solve one of the industry’s most persistent headaches: fragmentation. Developers can write AI models once and deploy them across completely different hardware without rewriting any code.
For Qualcomm, which sells processors across mobile devices, automotive systems, IoT hardware, and now data centers, Modular’s platform reduces the friction of deploying models on Qualcomm hardware specifically.
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