11 ms·

Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

• roflcopter69 3mo ago
  Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language. Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!
  • samuell 3mo ago
    I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time. Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack? Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.
    • samuell 3mo ago
      Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D
      • roflcopter69 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        • samuell 3mo ago
          No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.
          • roflcopter69 3mo ago
            I'm sorry, I read your message slightly wrong. Okay, makes sense to me.
          • throwawaygod 3mo ago
            But they changed their goal from being a python superset to pythonish language with great python interoperability. The only other thing they could've done differently is making the language not look like python superficially. I think chris achieved his goal of creating a language which takes full advantage of MLIR and also not repeating some of the mistakes made with swift's development.
          • augment_me 3mo ago
            Which is interesting given the Mojo blogs where they shit on the other pythonic eDSLs like Triton saying that it's a dead end
    • ainch 3mo ago
      They've said that Mojo is still on track to be open-sourced this year, post-acquisition.
  • pjmlp 3mo ago
    He already did that, Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.
    • adonese 3mo ago
      I think that was the motivation to make Mojo a superset of python.
      • pjmlp 3mo ago
        Yes, but apparently even that ended up being a pivot, with just enough Python, and now lets see what Qualcom makes out of it.
    • adev_ 3mo ago
      > Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement. This was doom to fail from the beginning. Swift will always have the image of an Apple product binded and controlled by the Apple ecosystem. This is very unlikely to change. Nobody sane of mind would bind there entire technology stack on something half proprietary with a support was from the beginning secondary outside of Apple platforms.
  • gugagore 3mo ago
    To say nothing of "Swift for TensorFlow" when Julialang was an option. To each their own!
  • jdub 3mo ago
    "first principles" and "from scratch" are predictable failure modes... he had very good reason to pursue a Python-like language given the circumstances and objectives
    • roflcopter69 3mo ago
      I think I get what you mean and I should have been more precise in my wording. I didn't mean that an alien language that looks nothing like we have ever seen but for the sake of doing it "right" from scratch would have been a good idea. A new programming language definitely should steal the ideas of other languages that turned out to be good. But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python just because there was too much design pressure to appeal to Python programmers. I wonder what Mojo could have looked like without this particular pressure. Basically, with what kind of programming language would a person with as much experience and good taste as Chris Lattner come up with if there were no such external pressures?
      • boxed 3mo ago
        > But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python Like what?
        • roflcopter69 3mo ago
          The "else" after a for-loop that executes only when the loop completely finished without a "break" or "return". While maybe a nice concept in general, using "else" for this is only to look familiar to Python programmers. The "else" word itself is really counter intuitive here in my opinion. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#for-loop-control-statements https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#for-loop-cont... Then there's "foo if cond else bar" which is Python's kind of ternary operator and it's at least slightly contentious. One could argue if a language even needs such a construct, but at least for me, I have an easier time reading the control flow when I look at "cond ? foo : bar". It gets even worse when you nest that stuff, although that's something you shouldn't do anyway. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#conditional-expressions https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#conditional-e... Also, indentation based syntax... well, it's a choice. I don't know if Lattner would have chose that in a language that he would have designed to his liking from scratch. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/reference/compound-statements/ https://mojolang.org/docs/reference/compound-statements/ Then there is some scoping related badness from Python that I think is really awful. In Python and Mojo (with a caveat) you can do this: if cond: foo = 42 print(foo) So the scope of a variable is function-level and Mojo adopted this and called it implicitly-declared variables (https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/variables/#implicitly-declared-variables https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/variables/#implicitly-decla...) as opposed to the concept of explicitly-declared variables (https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/variables/#implicitly-declared-variables https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/variables/#implicitly-decla...) they added on top which uses the "var" keyword and forces block-level scoping which I'd argue is the sane default. But no, to appease Python programmers, they have this awful function-level scoping by default and you have to opt into block-level scoping by adding a "var" in front of your variable declaration. But earlier, I was talking about a caveat in Mojo, so it's slightly less awful, because the compiler would complain in the code example above that "foo" might be uninitialized when getting to the print statement, so that's at least something nice, where the static type system prevents stupid mistakes that function-level scoping makes possible. To be fair, all the serious type checkers for Python would catch this as well. But I hope you get the idea. Those are things I highly doubt would have made it into the language if Lattner could have designed it to his liking from scratch.
  • adev_ 3mo ago
    > sorry for rambling. You're right to ramble. I also believe that the world need a high level language fitting for accelerators that is not Python. However developing something like that is by all means not a trivial task and many failed there.
    • havercosine 3mo ago
      Though, Modular should have been the team to do it. My theory is that they raised too much money too soon. With that kind of money, you get anxious investors waiting to see some magic on quarterly timelines. So Modular was forced to be compatible with Python as there's no other way to win quick developer mindshare. (Though I don't think they managed to do that either). A closest counter path I would have expected Modular to follow was Zig or Oxide computers (I know not apples to apples comparision). Start actually attacking the problem with hindsight and lessons of 30 years of Python, build something fresh, and try to patiently win the market. Rust is not going to win this market. The language has too much syntax friction to win over data science/AI folks and doesn't offer too much in parallel programming world. Julia, although beautiful attempt, couldn't gather enough support outside academia. In fact, if Nvidia cuTile, Triton, Jax keep delivering, Python seems unmatched at the moment. It is likely to be in the similar position that C/C++ have been in embedded and firmware world.
      • adev_ 3mo ago
        > My theory is that they raised too much money too soon. That's also my feeling. And that's the curse of many VC funded companies. And they are not even in the classical state of enshitification yet. > Rust is not going to win this market. Agree. Rust will never win this market. Nor Zig, which has the same genetical flaws as C++ for accelerators (excessive usage of pointer semantics among others). > Julia, although beautiful attempt, couldn't gather enough support outside academia. I will look mean, but for me, Julia is a language that never went to the design board. It sticked to a "Let's put Python on top of LLVM and add a proper GC" with one single objective: "let's make a clone of Python but fast". My feeling is also that it is an academia niche and will remain one. > In fact, if Nvidia cuTile, Triton, Jax keep delivering, Python seems unmatched at the moment. It is, and it is honestly pretty depressing. Triton solves most of the performance issues of Python for accelerators but also introduces one (several on fact) more DSL, one more tooling ecosystem and solves none of the (long list of) issues related to Python/Numpy programming model.
  • khurs 3mo ago
    Looked up Mojo "Mojo aims to combine the usability of a high-level programming language, specifically Python, with the performance of a system programming language such as C++, Rust, and Zig Mojo builds on the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) compiler software framework, instead of directly on the lower level LLVM compiler framework like many languages such as Julia, Swift, C++, and Rust.[16][17] MLIR is a newer compiler framework that allows Mojo to exploit higher level compiler passes unavailable in LLVM alone, and allows Mojo to compile down and target more than only central processing units (CPUs), including producing code that can run on graphics processing units (GPUs), Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and other accelerators. It can also often more effectively use certain types of CPU optimizations directly, like single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) with minor intervention by a developer, as occurs in many other languages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(programming_language)
    • teleforce 3mo ago
      >Mojo aims to combine the usability of a high-level programming language, specifically Python, with the performance of a system programming language such as C++, Rust, and Zig Providing usability without GC is an oxymoron. The best attempt so far for Pythonic compiled language is D, that's probably why it's not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry along side other languages comparison. D has GC by default but manual memory management is supported as well. Probably compiler researchers need to come with truly determinstic GC like the automotive industry invented the automatic gear. So that other existing compiled programming languages with GC like Go and D can thrive.
  • agreeablegoose 3mo ago
    Disclaimer: I work for Modular. Just wanted to confirm that we're still open sourcing Mojo this year! And appreciate the nuanced feedback.
• melodyogonna 3mo ago
  Qualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.
• melodyogonna 3mo ago
  Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing-deal-ai-chip-startup-modular-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...
  • nylonstrung 3mo ago
    I call BS, zero chance this traded at $4B. The fact they describe it as a "chip company" shouldn't give confidence
    • simplyvibecode 3mo ago
      Wired said ~$4B as well and linked the 8-k with the stock amount involved in the deal - based on some simple math of price at market open for the announcement + number of shares, it's directionally accurate.
• bobajeff 3mo ago
  It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks. * https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9-why-do-hw-companies-struggle-to-build-ai-software https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...
  • surajrmal 3mo ago
    Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.
    • ivell 3mo ago
      Still the result could be that the software performance much better on their hardware than others. Priorities, competition, etc.
  • pjmlp 3mo ago
    Patents, and tooling portfolio.
• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
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• bit_economist 3mo ago
  It's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.
  • cocoflunchy 3mo ago
    It's the first sentence of the article? "an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion"
• samuell 3mo ago
  As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.
  • lr1970 3mo ago
    There are multiple HN submissions on this topic and none of them gets traction. Weird...
  • zapzupnz 3mo ago
    It's on the front page now.
• revengerwizard 3mo ago
  Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.
• ssivark 3mo ago
  Qualcomm seems to be assembling a whole portfolio of technologies/products aimed at 1. Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V 2. Being competitive for AI/could needs instai of just chips for phones and other edge devices. Interesting to see bold and high-conviction moves in this direction. Tenstorrent, Modular, Ventana, Alphawave, etc.
  • MobiusHorizons 3mo ago
    > Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V The reason to move away from arm has nothing to do with performance, but rather avoiding licensing snafus like happened with their laptop chips. So far no one has delivered a risc-v core with class leading performance outside of the really low end. Not saying it can’t be done, but it will likely be a step back at first.
    • toxicdevil 3mo ago
      I'm not a hardware specialist. Qualcomm already has their custom CPU core. Can't they just switch out the frontend (fetch/decode) with RISCV and the rest shouldn't be a be big problem?
  • monkeydust 3mo ago
    Whats peoples thoughts on Tenstorrent - they were looking for funding on Hiive recently but that deal got pulled when Qualcomm rumours surface a week or so ago.
• WhereIsTheTruth 3mo ago
  Of all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip
  • afr0ck 3mo ago
    Why you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.
    • re-thc 3mo ago
      > Nuvia made a massively great success Not true. Nuvia has had huge delays as part of the acquisition. It resulted in ARM licensing lawsuits and many more and things dragged out.
      • refulgentis 3mo ago
        Yes, ARM sued Qualcomm, Qualcomm won, and separately Nuvia has shipped, 2, 3? times now? I don't know how it's a failure or if the delay were "huge" and "dragged out". It's not like it launched an old product or took years and years and years. 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase.
        • re-thc 3mo ago
          > 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase. Yes a world of a difference. That’s competing against an Apple M2 vs M4. You’ve given yourself 2 generations of disadvantage. You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too.
          • refulgentis 3mo ago
            > You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too. If Trump nuked TSMC's production lines the day before M1 went to production, and the production lines came back 3 years later, would Apple ship the M1 on it? Or, the M3? As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1. If it makes 0 sense, why project that idea onto me? When faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. (and read your interlocutor's, "It's not like it launched an old product" obviates your claim that I'd also applaud Intel's delays)
• deleted 3mo ago
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• semiinfinitely 3mo ago
  latty gotta get his baggy
• levodelellis 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• YuechenLi 3mo ago
  I honestly think Mojo would be better served if it is just a high-level language for GPU programming that compiles down to PTX with clear Python/Rust interop boundaries instead of trying for the "one language, multiple computational model" thing that they seem to be going for. The programming model between CPU and GPU programming is very different: code that runs best on CPU with heavy branching behaviors should not be written the same way as massively parallel matrix multiplication oriented GPU code, which I think they will be forced to do in the MLIR level anyway. So, you end up with a language that looks like Python, but doesn't behave like Python, and companies that adopt Mojo early with the promise of Python compatibility may find themselves running into edge cases with difficult to trace compiler error messages that would be nearly impossible to debug, especially with the addition of Zig style `comptime` as their metaprogramming model.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• dwa3592 3mo ago
  Has anyone used mojo/modular extensively in their work? I installed it as soon as it was available but never went past the toy examples.
  • disgruntledphd2 3mo ago
    I have a friend who is doing stuff with it, and he's incredibly excited about it, which is definitely a good sign. I was really excited about it at launch, but its proprietary nature put me off.
  • amoshebb 3mo ago
    I tried, also all a little while ago, really found the puzzles fun to do and then tried to implement some basic radar pipeline things and found lots of just basic 'building blocks' for signal processing (i/o things, fft) were missing to the point I went back to JAX. I'm still not manage memory on GPU the way I would like, but mojo (or, my ignorant first stab at it) did not let me exploit direct DMA type things anyway.
    • fnands 3mo ago
      What radar pipelines are you working on (out of pure curiosity here)
      • amoshebb 3mo ago
        Re-writing pretty straightforward weather processing from FPGA to GPU just to kick the tires on mojo
• maxloh 3mo ago
  I don't get it. Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market. The industry standard is the NVIDIA Hopper H100/H200. What could they possibly get from acquiring Modular?
  • mathisfun123 3mo ago
    You've never heard of an acquihire?
    • osigurdson 3mo ago
      I don't think $4B is reasonable for an acquihire. They must see value in the technology.
      • mathisfun123 3mo ago
        It's an all stock deal. No cash. With undoubtedly a very healthy earn out. > They must see value in the technology. What value? Mojo doesn't currently support any of Qualcomm's GPUs.
        • disgruntledphd2 3mo ago
          Exactly. If they can buy this talent to make their GPUs more valuable, then this deal makes sense. I'm actually a little happier about this deal than expected as it means the language may actually become open source.
        • fvrghl 3mo ago
          I have a friend who works at Modular. FWIU, the employees got shafted by the acquisition financially.
          • mathisfun123 3mo ago
            Yes I know multiple people there as well and heard the same thing.
• fishgoesblub 3mo ago
  Welp, I think I can give up on my hope for Mojo.
• markkitti 3mo ago
  Yesterday, LineShine a supercomputer in China emerges as #1 in the Top500 using ARM v9 based chips and no GPUs. Today, Qualcomm a premier designer of ARMv9 licensed chips in the United States acquires Modular, who has been creating a compiler stack that provides an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA stack. Are you ready for Qualcomm ARMv9 powered inference running Mojo/MAX written kernels doing low-cost inference at scale for AI?
  • IMcD23 3mo ago
    Are you a bot?
    • Archit3ch 3mo ago
      Mark (=the person you replied to) has appeared in conferences.
    • markkitti 3mo ago
      No, of course not. I am totally not a bot. I just like to connect together unrelated events to see trends at scale.
• moscoe 3mo ago
  Either this was the plan all along (cashing in on the bubble) or it’s an admission of failure.
  • bwfan123 3mo ago
    Mojo seemed like a passion project. The fundamental problem was never the lack of a great programming language, and inventing a python bastard child of a language is not a solution. But, respect and congrats to the Modular folks. HW companies have notoriously bad software teams and culture and hopefully this injects some good sw dna into the acquirer.
• fancyfredbot 3mo ago
  Modular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform. After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad. Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time learning mojo in the hope it might actually become cross platform.
  • ipsum2 3mo ago
    The best cross-platform API is CUDA, because we have ROCm.
    • pjmlp 3mo ago
      Only superficially, given what CUDA provides and what ROCm supports.
  • pjmlp 3mo ago
    The competition to CUDA and proprietary 3D APIs always overlooks developer productivity. For some strange reason there is this expectation, maybe due to UNIX background of those folks, that portable APIs have to exist without good IDE tooling, no graphical debuggers, no high level programming models, no libraries ecosystem. Then for some "strange" reason, GPU developers mostly pick proprietary and the cycle repeats itself.
    • melodyogonna 3mo ago
      But the Modular stack is focused on developer productivity. It is still early but there has been substantial work on all these
      • pjmlp 3mo ago
        I am yet to see the same Windows love as CUDA. Same to IDE integration and graphical debugging experience for GPU code. Until now, it was been the usual UNIX cli, and text mode lldb like debugging for CPU side. At least it what I have been made aware of.
• totalperspectiv 3mo ago
  Per modular Twitter, the plan is still to open source the mojo compiler this year: https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635 https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635
• mlazos 3mo ago
  Wtf? What a joke, but I mean the best way to become a billionaire is convince someone with a billion dollars to give it to you. This is actually insane, wow. I guess Qualcomm is desperate? Nobody was bidding for this, but congrats to the team at modular?! I’m actually salty about this because like I don’t feel like mojo was even good after trying it out.
• vshulcz 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• cisrockandroll 3mo ago
  RIP Modular
• carterschonwald 3mo ago
  so the most notoriously patent oriented tech firm is buying this up. lol ;) good for the founders. also explains why my resume got dropped on the floor as a desk reject :p
  • Danox 3mo ago
    That patent orientation is why it probably won’t go anywhere.
• fadenjfbc 3mo ago
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