Could Arm's legal battle with Qualcomm over technology licences stop Copilot+ PCs from really taking off?

Back in August 2022, chip design firm Arm filed a lawsuit in the US against Qualcomm, demanding that it destroy specific Arm-based technologies. With no progress made in the case, Qualcomm went on to use said technologies in its Snapdragon X processors, the only chips currently rated for use in Microsoft's new Copilot+ AI PCs. Given how much the PC industry is hoping AI will revive a somewhat flagged market, will this ongoing legal battle ultimately stop the AI PC from ever becoming successful?

According to a report by Reuters (via Heise), this question was frequently being discussed among attendees at Computex 2024. The whole situation started to form when Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a start-up company developing server CPUs, back in 2021.

That company had licenced processor architectures from Arm and once it became part of Qualcomm, the work development of the work carried on. Ultimately, Nuvia's designs were used in various high-end processors, including the Snapdragon X range.

However, in August 2022, Arm filed a lawsuit in the US District Court of Delaware, claiming that Qualcomm had no right to do so, because the moment Nuvia officially became part of Qualcomm, the former's Arm licences expired.

By using Nuvia's chip designs, Qualcomm was in breach of contract, according to the lawsuit, and as restitution, Arm demanded that Qualcomm must destroy any technologies developed using Nuvia's old licences.

Since that time, no progress has been made in the legal battle, and because it remains hanging over Qualcomm, the PC industry is rather concerned that it could derail the expected boom in laptop sales. That's because the star of the Copilot+ AI PC show is Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processor, which uses a version of Nuvia's CPU design, as it's currently the only chip that's ratified for use in Microsoft's AI PC ecosystem.

Qualcomm's position on the matter is that it believes that it «has broad, well-established license rights covering [its] custom-designed CPUs»,