- Qualcomm renewed its global patent license agreement with Apple
- The length and financial terms of the renewed Apple license were not disclosed
- The shiny new thing about Qualcomm is its push into the data center market
Qualcomm today announced the renewal of its global patent license agreement with Apple, effective April 1, 2027.
“We are pleased to extend the Apple license agreement,” said John Han, EVP and general manager of Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL), in a statement.
The company didn’t reveal the length of the agreement. Their current agreement ends on March 31, 2027, with an option to extend it by two years, Bloomberg reported.
The last time Qualcomm renewed its patent license agreement with Apple was in 2019.
This new patent agreement is separate from the company’s deal to supply Apple with cellular modems for smartphones through 2026.
Apple’s shrinking impact
Qualcomm has been trying to diversify for many years in anticipation of Apple no longer relying on Qualcomm for chips in its iPhone line-up, expanding into areas like data centers, automotive and IoT.
In Apple’s most recent launch, only the U.S. variant of the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses a Qualcomm modem, according to Tech Insights’ teardown report. The reason for that lone Qualcomm-equipped model may be because Apple wanted its U.S. variant to support millimeter wave spectrum.
Qualcomm’s financial outlook reflects its shrinking Apple footprint. The company expects handset revenue in its fourth fiscal quarter to be about $5.2 billion, driven by sequential growth in Android, offset by lower Apple product revenues.
But broadly speaking, future growth is really in non-handset revenue.
During the company’s last earnings call, CFO Akash Palkhiwala said they anticipate growth in non-handset revenues to accelerate from 24% in fiscal 2026 to greater than 60% in fiscal 2027, a “significant inflection point in the execution of our growth strategy.”
Like other tech giants, Qualcomm has been hit by the AI-driven supply shortage in memory components, but it expects to reach non-handset revenue targets for fiscal 2029 of $40 billion, up from a previous target of $22 billion, reflecting opportunities across automotive, IoT and data centers.
Qualcomm and data centers
At its Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui, Hawaii, this week, Palkhiwala told TheStreet that data centers represent a new area of growth for the company, joining its two other major businesses – smartphones and automotive/IoT.
“Qualcomm is a new player in data center, and it’s a massive, trillion-dollar market that we have a small share of right now,” he told the publication. “The goal we have laid out is approximately 5% of a trillion-dollar market.”
Earlier this month, Qualcomm announced a deal with Amazon across multiple generations of customized silicon to support large-scale AI data centers. The company is also working with Meta and one other hyperscaler whose identity was not revealed, according to TheStreet.
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