**[Qualcomm to Acquire Modular, Building an Open AI Software Ecosystem]** BlockBeats News, June 24 – Qualcomm announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Modular to strengthen its generative AI and agent-based AI software foundation for data centers and edge environments. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Qualcomm stated that Modular provides an open AI-native software stack that enables AI to run efficiently across different hardware architectures. Its unified platform supports CPU, GPU, NPU, and custom ASIC architectures without requiring model rewrites for each accelerator. For developers and enterprises, this means building once and deploying across various environments while reducing total cost of ownership. Qualcomm emphasized that as AI scales, efficiency, rather than capability, is becoming the limiting factor. Performance per watt will impact inference costs, and costs will determine whether AI can scale. This acquisition will further help Qualcomm deliver a hardware-agnostic compute layer across devices, edge, and data centers, improving performance per watt, increasing hardware flexibility, and expanding the open developer ecosystem. [Original Link]