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Rich [soylentnews.org] writes:

Chip maker Qualcomm has announced it will acquire software company Modular for $3.9bn in an all share transaction. (https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2026/06/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular [qualcomm.com]) Modular was founded by Chris Lattner, who is best known for the LLVM compiler backend and the invention of the Swift language from Apple. Modular develops a new language called "Mojo", which looks like Python, provides safety guarantees like Rust, and compiles down to highly efficient code to utilize massive parallelism. Mojo targets not only classic CPUs, but can also generate GPU shaders, to cover the full AI stack. It is assumed that Qualcomm will use Modular's offerings to attack Nvidia's proprietary Cuda system to gain traction in the datacenter space.

If all goes to plan, and the Qualcomm stock rises to AI bubble levels, Lattner will become the latest tech billionaire through software work alone. If not, he'll just walk away with a few hundred millions. Respect.

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