A federal jury in Wilmington, Delaware, decided on October 13, 2026, that Arm broke its architecture license agreement with Qualcomm. Then it put a price on the damage: one dollar per claim, two dollars in all.
The number is not the story. Nominal damages of that kind say a right was violated without any proven loss of money — and the breach finding itself is the thing Qualcomm came for, because it is the precondition for a remedy worth roughly a billion and a half.
What the jury decided
Six claims went to the jury after a five-day trial. Qualcomm won two of them; Arm won four.
Qualcomm's two wins. The jury found Arm Holdings plc and Arm Ltd. breached Section 5 of the Architecture License Agreement by withholding two kinds of technical material Qualcomm needed to certify its custom Oryon CPU cores: out-of-band software patches and the validation and testing tools known as ACK patches. The jury also found Arm had tortiously interfered with Qualcomm's business relationship with Meta, a claim built around Arm's alleged 2024 leak to Bloomberg of a confidential letter asserting that Qualcomm was in breach of its license.
Arm's four wins. The jury rejected Qualcomm's pricing claims under the most-favored-nation clause of the companies' Technology License Agreement, covering the "previous best deal" terms for the Hunter, Hayes and Yamin cores, a price ceiling, the terms of Arm's 2024 offer, and whether Arm made reasonable offers on its GIC-700, MMU-700 and ELA-600 peripheral designs.
The $1.5 billion question
What Qualcomm actually wants is enforcement of a clause in the same license that would let it stop paying Arm royalties for five years — around $300 million a year, or about $1.5 billion in total. Qualcomm argued before trial that the clause should apply automatically once a breach is established.
Arm's position is that the clause is an unenforceable penalty, out of proportion to any real harm, and that it acted in good faith throughout. On the Meta claim, Arm argued that Meta scaled back its deal because the company was shifting from virtual reality toward AI smart glasses, not because of any letter.
That dispute is not for the jury. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika is hearing it herself, in a bench trial whose closing arguments are set for October 20. She has two questions in front of her: whether the royalty-suspension clause can be enforced, and whether Arm negotiated in good faith over pricing for its ARMv10 architecture. Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon testified that Arm proposed raising royalty rates for ARMv10 by 1,800 percent over ARMv9.
No date has been set for her ruling.
What each side said
Qualcomm said it was "gratified that the jury found Arm breached its long-standing Architectural License Agreement (ALA)" and called the result a victory for innovation and competition.
Arm, in a statement published on its newsroom the same day, said it was "pleased with the jury's decision today finding for Arm on four claims," and argued that the two-dollar award confirmed the merit of its case. Arm chief executive Rene Haas, who has also led SoftBank Group International since April 2026, testified in the trial.
"Whenever you both license technology IP and use it yourself to compete with your licensees, it raises a number of competitive questions," Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, told Tech Times.
How the two companies got here
This is the second trial between them. In December 2024 a jury unanimously found that Qualcomm had not violated the architecture license by acquiring the chip-design startup Nuvia — the deal that produced the Oryon cores. Noreika entered final judgment on September 30, 2025, dismissing Arm's remaining claims and refusing a new trial. Arm appealed to the Third Circuit the next day, and that appeal is still pending.
Qualcomm's license with Arm runs through 2033. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission opened an antitrust investigation into Arm in May 2026, which is independent of this case.
Why it matters beyond the two companies
Arm's instruction-set architecture sits underneath most of the world's smartphones and a growing share of laptops and data-center servers, and Arm licenses it to the same companies it increasingly competes with. A ruling that a licensee can switch off royalty payments for five years after a breach would change the leverage in every one of those contracts — which is why a two-dollar verdict is being read closely across the industry.
Reporting from Tech Times, Tom's Hardware and Arm's newsroom.
