Qualcomm is acquiring Modular in an all-stock deal worth approximately $3.92 billion, announced at its investor day on June 24 and expected to close in the second half of 2026.
Modular was co-founded by Chris Lattner, the engineer who created LLVM and Apple’s Swift programming language: two pieces of infrastructure that most modern software now runs on.
The deal gives Qualcomm a vendor-neutral AI software platform already used by Oracle, Amazon, Nvidia, and AMD, and doubles Modular’s valuation from $1.6 billion just nine months ago.
Chris Lattner has spent his career building the infrastructure the software world runs on, without most people ever knowing his name. LLVM, the compiler toolkit he created during his PhD at the University of Illinois in the early 2000s, now underpins software development toolchains at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and ARM. Swift, the programming language he started building in secret at Apple in 2010, is what millions of iOS developers write in every day.
Now his latest company, Modular, has been acquired by Qualcomm in an all-stock deal worth approximately $3.92 billion, and this time, the target is the software lock-in that has made Nvidia almost impossible to displace in AI.
