Jury finds Arm breached Qualcomm license and awards $2 in Qualcomm v. Arm verdict

A federal jury in Delaware found on Tuesday, Oct. 13, that Arm Holdings breached its licensing agreement with Qualcomm and interfered with Qualcomm’s relationship with Meta Platforms, and awarded Qualcomm $2, Bloomberg Law reported. The jury sided with Arm on four separate counts tied to a different licensing agreement. The mixed verdict came after a five-day trial.

The $2 is nominal damages, a token award a jury gives when it finds a legal wrong but no proven dollar loss. Here it came to $1 for each of the two claims Qualcomm won, according to Arm’s statement. Reuters described the finding as Arm having breached its architectural license agreement and sought to disrupt Qualcomm’s business, in a headline aggregated by Techmeme.

What the fight is about

Arm doesn’t make most of the chips that carry its name. It licenses designs and the instruction set, the basic language a processor speaks, to companies such as Qualcomm, which pay fees and royalties to build on it. An architectural license is the broader kind: it lets the licensee design its own processor cores that speak Arm’s language, which is how Qualcomm builds its Oryon CPUs.

That license is the money in this relationship. The two companies first went to trial in December 2024, when a jury found Qualcomm did not breach its license by buying chip startup Nuvia and using that work in its Snapdragon X PC chips, Thurrott reported. Arm withdrew its remaining complaints in February 2025.

In this second case, Qualcomm accused Arm of scuttling a $170 million chip sale to Meta by withholding software, violating pricing structures and leaking a license-termination warning letter, per Thurrott. Qualcomm had originally sought to avoid paying licensing fees to Arm for five years, Thurrott reported.

Two statements, one verdict

Both companies claimed the result.

Qualcomm said it was “gratified that the jury found Arm breached its long-standing Architectural License Agreement (ALA) with Qualcomm, failed to honor its commitments, and intentionally acted to disrupt Qualcomm’s businesses.”

Arm said the jury found for it on four claims and awarded “only one dollar in damages on each of Qualcomm’s other two claims.” It said Qualcomm brought the case “in an attempt to deprive Arm of billions of dollars under our license agreements,” and that the “award of only two dollars confirms the merit of Arm’s arguments.”

The jury did find a breach and interference. It also put the provable harm at nothing a jury could count, against a Meta sale Qualcomm valued at $170 million.

What the $2 leaves behind

Nominal damages exist for this situation. They let a court record that a contract was broken even when the side that sued can’t prove what the breach cost it in dollars, which is why a $2 award still counts as a win on the claims it covers.

A check for $2 gets paid once. A jury’s conclusion that Arm breached the architectural license sits in the record of a relationship that runs on that same license, and Qualcomm is the side that gets to point to it the next time the two companies argue over terms. Arm, for its part, gets to point to a jury that heard Qualcomm’s damages case and didn’t buy it.

Neither statement mentions an appeal, a settlement or a renegotiated license.

The last time these two met in front of a jury, Arm said it would appeal and then dropped its remaining claims about two months later.

Sources

• Bloomberg Law: Qualcomm wins mixed jury verdict in licensing feud with Arm (Oct 13, 2026; first grafs)
• Arm newsroom statement
• Reuters headline (Tom Hals) via Techmeme
• Thurrott: Qualcomm prevails against Arm Holdings in court again (Oct 13, 2026), incl. Qualcomm statement