How Qualcomm’s Open Software Strategy Challenges NVIDIA

Competing in AI means confronting software lock-in. In the data center, Nvidia’s CUDA exerts developer gravity, where every pipeline built for it raises the cost of moving elsewhere. At the edge, vendor-specific board support packages and software trees can lock future designs into the first processor decision.

That dependence becomes more costly as AI workloads span racks, PCs, phones, wearables, industrial controllers, and robots. Agentic applications shift work between the cloud and the device, making flexibility in price, power, and performance more valuable.

Qualcomm has spent the past year assembling its answer. Since early 2025, it has announced the acquisitions of Edge Impulse, Arduino, and Modular, and, most recently, PickNik Robotics.

At its recent Snapdragon Summit event, the company reinforced through a series of announcements how the acquisitions support Qualcomm’s open approach to entering new markets.

Note: The author and his firm, NAND Research, has previously provided advisory or other analyst services to Qualcomm.

While each acquisition closes a competitive gap, it also keeps the layers above the processor open and portable. This enables the broader non-Nvidia market and allows Qualcomm and others to compete aggressively for the socket below.

Open Software, Differentiated Silicon

Qualcomm’s core technologies remain proprietary. These span CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and DSPs, as well as modems, RF, power management, and heterogeneous-compute architecture. Delivering open software layers above proprietary silicon reduces adoption friction, enabling developers to build without committing to Qualcomm.

This differs from competitors like Nvidia, with its proprietary CUDA-based software framework, and AMD, with its ROCm software stack. While AMD’s ROCm is open source, it supports only AMD GPUs and accelerators.

Each of Qualcomm’s assembled platforms addresses a different development need, and the company remains committed to openness and third-party hardware support.