Qualcomm to pay Huawei under patent cross-license, says analysis
An analysis published by TMTPost (authored by Shi Tianhao) says Huawei and Qualcomm reached a multi-year, broad patent licensing agreement covering cross-licenses in 5G, computing, AI and networking, with Qualcomm also acquiring some of Huawei's US patents in computing, AI and networking. Citing CCTV Finance, it says Qualcomm will pay to use more than 680 Huawei patents, and that Huawei's cumulative licensing revenue across all agreements is expected to exceed $6.9 billion (the value of this deal was not disclosed); Qualcomm has denied being a "net payer" and denied the transaction involves "logic folding." The piece sets the deal in a 25-year timeline in which Huawei, once the payer, has become a payee, contrasts the Kirin 9050 Pro's "logic folding" and Taifa with Xiaomi's XRING O1, and notes claims that Ascend's China market share has passed Nvidia, that DeepSeek is co-developing open-source software tooling for Ascend, and that AMD is buying World Labs for about $8.2 billion.
If accurate, the agreement signals a shift in Chinese firms' leverage over 5G and AI-related standard patents, and highlights whether system-level and super-node engineering can offset single-chip process limits.