Arm Holdings plc (ARM) Escalates Legal Dispute with Qualcomm by Canceling Chip Design License, Impacting Smartphone Industry #IndustryFinance
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We recently compiled a list of the 20 AI News Investors Should Not Miss.In this article, we are going to take a look at where Arm Holdings plc (NASDAQ:ARM) stands against the other AI stocks you should not miss.
2024 has been a big year for AI breakthroughs, and the momentum shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Generative AI has arguably been the biggest trend, with McKinsey estimating that it could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in value across industries annually, based on 63 use cases they analyzed. Back in 2022, when OpenAI launched its free web app, ChatGPT, few could have predicted the scale of the AI revolution that would follow. Major tech giants have since followed suit, revealing their own chatbot-based assistants, AI-enabled phones, and much more.
READ ALSO: 15 AI News Investors Should Not Miss and 20 Trending AI Stocks on Latest News and Ratings
As AI continues to revolutionize industries and push technological boundaries to new heights, today’s headlines reveal just how impactful these advancements can be. The question of the hour is, with all of these big AI breakthroughs, are regulators finally catching up with developers working on their next big AI projects? Yahoo Finance’s Catalysts features an interview with Credo AI Founder and CEO Navrina Singh, discussing the sustainability of the valuations and growth of AI companies, and the potential risks they may pose. Credo AI is an AI governance platform streaming responsible AI adoption and automating oversight.
According to Singh, even though AI developers may see governance as a “speed bump in innovation”, companies who start with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence with the right guardrails in place will eventually end up being “long-term winners”. Regardless of how long it takes for governance to fully catch up, the AI frenzy continues to intensify. In recent news, the world’s largest asset management firm led under the leadership of Larry Fink launched a new AI-focused exchange traded fund on Tuesday, October 22.
Tony Kim, head of the fundamental equities technology group, believes that AI is a growing stack of opportunity. The ETF is going to hold a concentrated portfolio of around 30 to 40 stocks, with new winners to be added as they emerge. According to Kim, the whole concept of the portfolio is to embody the concept of time and stack. That said, even though the AI trade has lost some spark, the plans and spending for advanced AI, in hopes of achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI, make the portfolio very relevant.
“Most of these companies in tech are all racing to get to AGI. We all have different views of AGI and when AGI will happen and what it will cost, but it will cost a lot more. Orders of magnitude more. And not only will it take that much more [money]it will take that much time”.
That said, many of the companies that may prove to be the winners in the AI revolution may not be on investors’ radars yet, or may not even have begun being publicly traded. Consider Daze, a creative AI-powered messaging application that hasn’t even launched yet but already shows the potential to challenge leading platforms once it hits the market. Prelaunch, the app’s waitlist is already overflowing with approximately 156,000 sign-ups (and counting).
The momentum of the Daze app is happening alongside broader technical advancements, such as the launch of “Swifts,” or stratospheric, which are AI-enabled robotic cameras that fly on weather balloons, by a New York-based startup called Near Space Labs. The technology aims to assess property risks and climate-related disasters, helping insurance companies pay out claims within days instead of weeks or months.
In other news, Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity AI has begun fundraising talks looking to double its valuation to $8 billion or more, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perplexity AI is an AI-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Recently, the search engine has been facing numerous lawsuits from the likes of Dow Jones and the New York Post, alleging that the company uses copyrighted content unlawfully. Publishers claim that such bypasses are depriving them of advertising and subscription revenue, and also undermining the work of journalists. Even though Perplexity AI has launched a revenue-sharing program with some publishers, many still continue to push back and seek legal protection for their content.
For this article, we selected AI stocks by combing through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
High angle view of a semiconductor chip against an array of electronics components.
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 38
Arm Holdings plc (NASDAQ:ARM) is a semiconductor and software design company that designs and manufactures semiconductor technology and other related products. The company showcases leadership in mobile and AI technology with products like the Axion processor, Ethos-U85, and Windows on Arm. The company’s chips are used in conjunction with GPUs in data centers and to enable on-device AI features in smartphones.
On October 23, Bloomberg reported that Arm Holdings plc (NASDAQ:ARM) is canceling a chip designing license with Qualcomm. The design allowed longtime partner Qualcomm Inc. to use Arm’s intellectual property to design chips. This move would have an impact on a majority of smartphone manufacturers that rely on Qualcomm chips.
Arm Holdings plc (NASDAQ:ARM) has given Qualcomm a mandated 60-day notice of the cancellation of their architectural license agreement, which previously allowed the latter to create their chips based on standards owned by Arm. This move marks an escalation to a legal battle that started when Arm sued Qualcomm in 2022 for breaking their contract and misusing its trademarks. The company has now given Qualcomm eight weeks to resolve the issue before taking further action.
Arm states that it was “necessary to protect the unparalleled ecosystem that Arm and its highly valued partners have built over more than 30 years”. In response, the Qualcomm spokesperson stated that these are “more unfounded threats designed to strong-arm a longtime partner” and increase royalty rates. It “appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process, and its claim for termination is completely baseless. Arm’s anticompetitive conduct will not be tolerated.”
The two companies are now headed to resolve a breach of contract lawsuit filed by Arm and a countersuit by Qualcomm. It centers on the latter’s 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, another Arm licensee, and Arm’s claim that Qualcomm failed to renegotiate contract terms. On the other hand, Qualcomm asserts that the existing agreement covers Nuvia’s activities. Nuvia’s work on microprocessor design is crucial for the personal computer chips that Qualcomm sells, as well as their more widely used Snapdragon chips for smartphones.
Overall ARM ranks 14th on our list of the AI stocks you should not miss. While we acknowledge the potential of ARM as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than ARM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
