Qualcomm Acquires Modular for $3.92 Billion to Challenge Nvidia

Qualcomm has agreed to buy Modular — the AI startup behind the Mojo programming language and MAX inference engine — for $3.92 billion, a direct move to dismantle Nvidia's grip on AI software through the CUDA ecosystem. The deal pairs Modular's portable AI software stack with Qualcomm's new Dragonfly data center hardware, including its C1000 CPU and AI accelerators. It is one of the largest bets yet that the AI industry's next battleground is the software layer beneath the model, not the model itself.