Qualcomm licenses patents on Huawei’s LogicFolding chip tech (bloomberg.com)

But how can they patent this, as 3D chips have been built for decades already?

I mean, it is nice that they found out some properties (lower heat than expected), but you cannot patent that, I suppose.

With the current state of the U.S politics, nothing is sure.

They can just donate some crypto to one of the Trump kids to get it approved…

Big companies were sometimes getting sanction waivers. In energy, Exxon for example has been getting waivers to keep investing in Russian oil and gas since 2014. They got out in 2022 though, and the waivers stopped (I've no idea which ended first, the waivers or Exxon's interest in those projects).

IIRC US/BIS carved out exemptions for intangibles like SEP patent licenses. Entity list for controlled goods export/import. Regardless, US would also be stupid not to pay Huawei, PRC pays $4 for every $1 she receives for IP, ~30B deficit, most to US. PRC takes home more $$$ if US tries to lawfare it's way out of paying. But bigger stick is PRC entrenched in supply chains enough that Huawei (with PRC pressure) can sue OEMs (patent enforcement happens at device level)... all domestic PRC manufactures, foxconn, samsung, apple (really anyone that uses PRC supply chains at all) on chopping block, i.e. functionally global sales injunction against any 3/4/5g hardware that uses QC which has to use HW SEPs, which covers their entire portfolio... mobile, auto, iot, edge comptue... aka QC dead if it doesn't pay.

Can the US government prove they did (a headline is not proof)? Can Qualcomm even enforce patents against Huawei anyway, or vice versa? Maybe they're just handshake-agreeing on the status quo.

Huawei has been leading in 5G deployments until US decides him and his allies cannot be friends with Huawei.

Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.

maybe 6g is on the way and they don't care about 5g anymore.

Nortel 2.0.

Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.

Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.

They're not giving it away, rather they're essentially forming a patent oligopoly. Huawei and Qualcomm together hold the bulk of patents for 5G. It's of no value to them to try to litigate against each other. Here they're getting a cross-licensing deal that will solidify their patent licensing wall/revenues.

Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.

The alternative would be trying to file court cases outside the US for Qualcomm, which is where Huawei does most of its business and infringing.

There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.

Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.

That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.

I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.

To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.

I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.

https://insights.greyb.com/5g-patent-landscape/

The US will never lead 5G because many key patents there are owned by Huawei. Same for 6G. They're just now acknowledging reality.

> And now they are just giving it away ?

That's now how standards work - to become 5g the tech needs to be implementable by everyone at a FRAND cost (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Sharing patents just means Qualcomm and Huawei won't bill each other.

Huawei is a massive R&D company - I'm sure they're contributing as much as Qualcomm

The point is that this allows QC to sell chips in China without royalty.

Everyone else wrote the 5G specs but Huawei built the hardware.

I think this is the other way around.

I don't understand how standards are allowed to be patent encumbered - I get it they aren't really, but more often than not (like with the Oracle vs Google Java lawsuit) there's just one possible and obvious way to implement patents thats both efficient and correct.

For example in telco, error correcting codes are often designed in a way, that there's an algorithm that can turn the logic into a netlist.

Thanks - maybe we'll change the URL to that one, since it gives more background (and for once there's a working archive link).

I'll put the submitted URL (https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/10/qualcomm-broad-patent...) in the top text. A rule of thumb is we prefer the best 3rd party report to a corporate press release, when available (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). (This is a rare exception to HN's 'original source' rule in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

works here..

Patents that are only going to be used for trolling shouldn't be granted in the first place.

You know, at this scale law, is more like suggestion if benefits of not following it are better.

Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85n2vyleo)

You can ask AI to summarise the list of when for example apple ignored patents. I get 16 cases.

QC will send them a sad emoji if their patents are violated in China.

Patents just embed western monopolies and cost everyone except the sovereign wealth funds and private equity that own everything in the west.

Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side.

What a strange sarcasm, nobody's forcing Qualcomm to do this.

Chinese phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm hardware generally do respect the royalty system. Though they pay a lower total royalty because of a 2015 antitrust action in China, which forced Qualcomm to calculate royalties on 65% of the net selling price of devices sold for use in China, rather than 100% used in most of the rest of the world. (For those unfamiliar, Qualcomm's royalties are not a flat fee per device/modem, they're calculated as a percentage of the total selling price of the finished device, sometimes with a negotiated cap.)

China is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.

why does Huawei need Qualcomm for handsets? Aren't the already producing their own processors at scale?

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Good luck finding chips that don't use any Qualcomm IP.

Huawei can do something funny in this new trade war era.