Qualcomm's Trial Week: Jury Sessions Run Daily in Delaware as a Huawei Cross-License Lands
The courtroom event this market has been tracking for months is finally underway. The Delaware District Court's official hearing calendar shows Qualcomm Incorporated et al v. ARM Holdings PLC, case 1:24-cv-00490-MN, before Judge Maryellen Noreika, in jury trial — daily sessions at 9:00/9:30 AM in Courtroom 4A on Oct 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, with a session also docketed Sept 30. The trial covers Qualcomm's breach-of-contract and pricing claims against Arm — the case that will put a judicial price tag on the Arm-licensing economics underpinning every Arm-based data-center entrant, including Qualcomm's own.
The offsetting piece of good news landed just in time: Qualcomm and Huawei announced a multi-year, broad patent cross-license agreement covering 5G, compute, AI, and networking, which per market reports also includes Qualcomm licensing Huawei's "LogicFolding" chipmaking technique. QCOM shares rose +1.5% Monday to $184.87 on the news.
The tape into trial week was rough, though: QCOM fell -8.5% over the past five days (from $201.97 on Sept 26 to $184.87), sits -25.7% below its 52-week high, and is +10.2% above its 200-day with RSI 53 — a round trip that has already unwound most of the post-investor-day re-rating. Fundamentals remain under pressure: TTM revenue -4.0% YoY, and the June quarter's EPS of $1.53 narrowly missed estimates. The Amazon warrant-strike tripwire at $161.26 remains far below — no threat for now.
Why it matters: The trial is the near-term binary — a Qualcomm win on Arm's pricing claims would compress the royalty layer every Arm-based server-chip entrant pays and strengthen QCOM's negotiating hand; a loss would hand Arm pricing power and cloud the data-center roadmap math. The Huawei deal is strategically interesting (a China IP détente with technology access attached) but small near-term. The structural bear is unchanged: Nvidia's N1X PC processor ships this fall (see Nvidia's N1X Goes Retail: RTX Spark Ships This Fall to Six PC Makers — the Client-Chip War Goes Mainstream), attacking the client franchise that funds the diversification story.