Qualcomm's massive Snapdragon chip empire could be under threat with Arm Holdings PLC killing their partnership with the firm.

Any company that makes Arm chips must license technology from Arm Holdings plc, the British company that develops the instruction set. Companies can license the instruction set and create their own CPU designs or license one of Arm's ready-made Cortex CPU core designs to incorporate into their own chips.

The chip design firm gave a mandated 60-day notice of their cancelation to Qualcomm, Bloomberg reports. Arm claims that when Qualcomm acquired AI chip company Nuvia - which uses the Arm architecture - for $1.4 billion in 2021, it was required to seek Arm's approval to transfer licenses from Nuvia over to Qualcomm.

Arm has reportedly scrapped its license with Qualcomm, which granted the company the right to design chips based on Arm technology standards.

PCs with Intel and AMD processors also qualify as Copilot+ certified, so any failure to resolve the dispute, or defeat for Qualcomm, won’t disrupt AI capabilities from appearing in Windows laptops, but the Oryon core is also used in high-end smartphones and tablets due for release in the coming weeks.

The two companies are in a legal spat over Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia, which uses a form of chip Arm technology.

Arm has finally thrown its toys and given 60 days notice that it intends to cancel Qualcomm's licence to produce chips based on Arm technology. So says Bloomberg, which claims to have seen Arm documents detailing the move.