Qualcomm Is Acquiring Modular
Qualcomm is acquiring Modular, a company founded by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis, known for its AI inference engine and the Mojo programming language.
Background
- Chris Lattner is a legendary computer scientist and engineer, best known as the original creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Clang compiler, both foundational to modern software development (e.g., Apple's Swift language, Xcode, and most of the major programming language ecosystems).
- Modular is an AI infrastructure startup founded by Lattner and Tim Davis (formerly of Google). Its main product was the "Modular AI Engine" (MAX), a platform designed to simplify and accelerate the deployment of AI models across different hardware (GPUs, CPUs, etc.).
- Qualcomm is the world's largest mobile chipmaker, competing heavily in the AI hardware space for smartphones, automotive, and edge devices.
- This acquisition, announced March 2025, aims to bring Lattner and Modular's AI software expertise in-house to strengthen Qualcomm's developer tools for on-device AI, competing with efforts from Apple, NVIDIA, and others.