Qualcomm Technologies (QCOM) has built its name as a go-to supplier of chips for smartphones, but as that market has slowed in recent years, the chipmaker has been expanding into other sectors.
The company has been making an aggressive push into the automotive industry, and is also moving into laptop computers and industrial machines.
And now on Tuesday, Qualcomm announced that it has acquired Arduino, a nonprofit Italian open-source hardware and software platform that includes a community of more than 33 million developers.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, Qualcomm said that Arduino “will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission.”
The Arduino open-source platform is used by everyone from high school and university students to professional engineers.
“Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem,” Qualcomm said in its press release announcing the acquisition.
Arduino’s hardware and software is compatible with a range of chips besides Qualcomm’s and the two companies said that it would continue to support these chips from other makers.
Qualcomm also introduced a new Arduino development board called UNO Q that is powered by its Dragonfly processor. The board is the first one that will work with Arduino App Lab, which is a tool that helps developers bridge the gap between different coding languages in order to speed up the development process.
“Arduino has built a vibrant global community of developers and creators,” Nakul Duggal, group general manager of Automotive, Industrial and Embedded IoT at Qualcomm said in a statement.
“By combining their open-source ethos with Qualcomm Technologies’ portfolio of leading edge products and technologies, we’re helping enable millions of developers to create intelligent solutions faster and more efficiently—including a path towards global commercialization by leveraging the scale of our ecosystem.”
Experts see 33 million reasons to like this deal
In addition to its deal for Arduino, Qualcomm this year also acquired AI platform Edge Impulse, which specializes in integrating machine learning into AI and edge IoT devices. And last year, Qualcomm bought embedded software developer Foundries.io.
Duggal said these three acquisitions are “accelerating our vision to democratize access to our leading‑edge AI and computing products” for developers.
Patrick Moorhead, founder and CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy, said in a post on X that Qualcomm’s deal for Arduino “is yet one more move to get more embedded into the edge IoT, robotics and edge AI market and drive growth after Edge Impulse and Foundries-IO.”
“Qualcomm will get much deeper access to developers with 33M creators and the favored platform will likely become the standard for Arduino going forward,” he added.
Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, echoed these sentiments, saying that Qualcomm’s latest acquisition “scales the physical AI and IoT play while giving Qualcomm a community of 33 million developers working on high volume edge, IoT, and robotics hardware + software.”
Newman noted that it will “take some time but Qualcomm has the portfolio in all the areas that could change how it’s valued substantially.”
Qualcomm’s stock fell nearly 2% on Tuesday, but it’s up 7.7% for the year.
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