Qualcomm agreed to acquire Modular, the Palo Alto AI software company co-founded by Chris Lattner, the creator of Apple's Swift programming language. Qualcomm announced the deal on June 24, 2026. A regulatory filing shows the two companies signed the definitive agreement on June 21.
Qualcomm is paying in stock. It expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares of its common stock to Modular's equity owners in a private placement, with the final number subject to closing purchase price adjustments. Reuters valued the shares at about $3.92 billion based on Qualcomm's last closing price before the announcement, while Bloomberg Government put the figure at about $3.9 billion.
Qualcomm said it expected to close in the second half of 2026. The deal closed on July 29, 2026, about five weeks after it was announced, according to Unite.AI. Lattner became Qualcomm's executive vice president of advanced AI software and platforms, and Modular's Mojo, MAX and Modular Cloud products continue under their own names.
What Modular built
Modular makes software that lets AI models run on different kinds of chips without being rewritten for each one. Its platform supports CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and custom ASICs, so developers can build a model once and deploy it across hardware from different vendors.
The company's products include Mojo, a systems programming language, and MAX, a framework for building and serving generative AI models that customers can run themselves or use through Modular Cloud. Modular also offers hosted inference through shared and dedicated endpoints.
Reuters described Modular's software as a challenge to CUDA, the Nvidia platform that has helped underpin Nvidia's lead in AI chips. When Modular raised its last round in 2025, SDxCentral listed Inworld, SF Compute, Jane Street, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Lambda Labs and TensorWave among its customers and partners.
“Modular was founded on the belief that AI needs a more open and efficient software foundation that can span diverse hardware and deployment environments. Joining Qualcomm gives us the scale and platform reach to accelerate that mission.”
Why Qualcomm is buying
Qualcomm, which sells Snapdragon processors and has been seeking a larger foothold in the data center market as demand for generative AI grows, said Modular would give it a silicon-agnostic compute layer across devices, edge systems and data centers. It said the software would improve performance per watt, give customers more hardware flexibility and help its new AI chips perform well from the day they launch.
In its announcement, Qualcomm argued that as AI scales, efficiency rather than capability becomes the constraint: performance per watt drives the cost of inference, and cost decides what can be deployed widely. It said developers need software that turns raw chip performance into reliable AI services across many kinds of accelerators.
The company also said the deal would strengthen its relationships with model creators, developers, hyperscalers and enterprises, and expand an open developer ecosystem around its hardware.
Chief executive Cristiano Amon said the industry was moving toward disaggregated, multi-vendor architectures that need a more open software foundation, and that the future belonged to developer-friendly platforms that run across diverse compute environments.
The founders and the funding
Lattner founded Modular in 2022 with Tim Davis, a former colleague at Google. Before Modular, Lattner created Swift at Apple and later led Tesla's Autopilot software team.
Modular raised $380 million across three rounds. GV led its first financing in 2022, a round of about $30 million. In August 2023 the company raised $100 million led by General Catalyst, with SV Angel, Greylock, GV and Factory participating, taking its total to $130 million.
In September 2025 Modular raised a $250 million Series C at a $1.6 billion valuation, nearly triple its previous valuation. The round was led by Thomas Tull's U.S. Innovative Technology fund, with DFJ Growth joining as a new investor and GV, General Catalyst and Greylock taking part. The company had grown past 130 employees by late 2025.
A bet on software for AI chips
At about $3.9 billion, the price values Modular at roughly 2.5 times the $1.6 billion valuation it reached in its Series C, nine months before the announcement.
Because the payment is in Qualcomm stock issued through a private placement, Modular's shareholders hold restricted Qualcomm shares, and the dollar value of the deal moves with Qualcomm's share price.
Lattner said Modular was founded on the belief that AI needs a more open and efficient software foundation that can span different hardware, and that Qualcomm would give the team the scale and reach to pursue that goal.
