Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

ckton 6 days ago

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/10/qualcomm-to-acquire-arduino-accelerating-developers--access-to-i

I personally don't know how to feel towards this news but coming from someone working for a company that uses a lot of Arduino shields made by other semiconductor companies, this could be good news for better support and improved performance or a slow yet significant increase in board prices, which may force beginners to move to cheaper alternatives i.e. ESP boards.

I wonder how will this affect open-source hardware and software movement moving forward.

Let me know what others think about this news.

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ckton 5 days ago

Something to add that awhile ago, Qualcomm recently also acquired Edge Impulse because they were trying to break into the embedded AI space with their tooling and 'push' their Qualcomm boards for inference and edge AI.

Recently, they did a live event to discuss their plans with Arduino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYb8YzdMWbc and yes, they were ready with answers for the FAQs: https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/10/07/a-new-chapter-for-arduino-with-qualcomm-uno-q-and-you/.

It's really how much and how long of a support (drivers, docs, etc.) can Arduino provide the community with their existing and incoming boards a lot moving forward though like any hardware companies, you can only support so much boards in the long run with limited resources so priority where these support goes is key.
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ckton 5 days ago

Something to add that awhile ago, Qualcomm recently also acquired Edge Impulse because they were trying to break into the embedded AI space with their tooling and 'push' their Qualcomm boards for inference and edge AI.

Recently, they did a live event to discuss their plans with Arduino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYb8YzdMWbc and yes, they were ready with answers for the FAQs: https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/10/07/a-new-chapter-for-arduino-with-qualcomm-uno-q-and-you/.

It's really how much and how long of a support (drivers, docs, etc.) can Arduino provide the community with their existing and incoming boards a lot moving forward though like any hardware companies, you can only support so much boards in the long run with limited resources so priority where these support goes is key.
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BigG 5 days ago in reply to ckton

In that sense Qualcomm is a good fit in terms of keeping things going. For example, even though the sun has set for 2G/3G cellular, no doubt Qualcomm still have CDMA drivers out there being maintained somehow. Same for OFDMA powerline. Now this is being used in WiFi. The joint desire to make something interesting within the SBC space will be interesting to watch.
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