Qualcomm and Huawei have announced a multi-year cross-licensing patent agreement covering 5G, artificial intelligence, compute and networking. What stands out is not the deal itself but its direction: according to Tom’s Hardware, for the first time in 25 years Qualcomm will pay Huawei to use its technology, the opposite of what had been happening since 2001. The US company will also buy outright some of Huawei’s US patents, a transaction still pending regulatory approval.
A 25-year turnaround in the patent tug of war
The ties between both companies go back a long way. In 2001, when Huawei was still a Chinese telecom-infrastructure supplier, it signed a royalty-bearing license to build CDMA network equipment under Qualcomm patents. The relationship later soured: Huawei stopped paying royalties in 2018, a back-royalty dispute was settled in 2020 and in 2024 the United States revoked the license that allowed Qualcomm to sell certain hardware to Huawei. Since early 2025, Qualcomm had stopped counting royalty revenue from the Chinese manufacturer. Now the flow reverses: the Chinese giant goes from paying for foreign technology to charging for its own, a shift in position that would have been hard to imagine in its day.
What the Qualcomm-Huawei deal includes
The pact is described as a “broad patent license agreement” that allows cross-licenses and refers to FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) principles. According to Huawei, it involves no other form of business cooperation, which in practice rules out chip sales. Qualcomm’s patent purchase covers compute, AI, networking and “other technologies”, though neither the number of patents nor their value has been disclosed.
Huawei puts the total value of its licensing contracts at more than $6.9 billion since it earned its first royalties from Motorola in 2011, and says that since 2021 its licensing business has brought in more than it pays for other firms’ patents. In 2025 it reported 165,000 active granted patents worldwide, and in August it signed a Wi-Fi patent cross-license with HP.
Qualcomm’s version: “we are not net payors”
Qualcomm was quick to qualify the narrative. In a statement issued after the announcement, the company called incorrect the reports describing it as a “net payor” on the deal and denied that it is related to LogicFolding, the vertical silicon-stacking technique that, according to Bloomberg, was said to be part of the agreement. Qualcomm does confirm it will buy certain Huawei non-cellular US patents across several technology areas. With the contract terms kept confidential, the Chinese firm’s public account and the US firm’s do not fully agree on one basic point: who pays whom.
The dispute is not minor, because it touches the core of the licensing business. Huawei has spent years defending its portfolio in court —in 2024 it sued MediaTek for alleged patent infringement— and its general counsel even testified against Qualcomm in the antitrust trial the FTC opened in 2019. Now, with more than 165,000 active patents, it sits on the other half of the table.
What changes for users
Little on the surface, and it should not be confused with a product story. The deal involves no chip sales or immediate changes to the phones sold in Spain: it is an intellectual-property transaction between manufacturers, with confidential terms and no final figures. What matters is the balance of power within 5G and AI patents, a field where Huawei has gone from paying for foreign technology to charging for its own.
Qualcomm also renewed its license with Apple last month, effective from April 1, 2027. The closing of the patent purchase has no public timetable and will not appear in Qualcomm’s fourth-quarter report, whose fiscal year ended before the announcement, so the deal’s numbers will take time to surface.
The move leaves a useful snapshot for reading the market: over the next decade, whoever controls the 5G and AI patents will have as much influence over what you buy as whoever makes the chip. At this pace, the licensing tug of war is no longer won only by whoever sells the most phones.
