alt.hn

6/24/2026 at 12:04:46 PM

Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

 https://www.modular.com/blog/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular

by colesantiago

6/24/2026 at 12:43:59 PM

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!

by roflcopter69

6/24/2026 at 2:30:35 PM

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.

by samuell

6/24/2026 at 3:41:14 PM

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

by samuell

6/24/2026 at 3:59:40 PM

Can you please provide a source for this claim?

by roflcopter69

6/24/2026 at 4:08:39 PM

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.

by samuell

6/24/2026 at 6:26:30 PM

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.

by ssivark

6/24/2026 at 1:47:12 PM

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...

by bobajeff

6/24/2026 at 2:36:08 PM

Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.

by surajrmal

6/24/2026 at 3:43:32 PM

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.

by bit_economist

6/24/2026 at 1:02:20 PM

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.

by melodyogonna

6/24/2026 at 4:31:50 PM

Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.

by revengerwizard

6/24/2026 at 3:57:30 PM

As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.

by samuell