Cutting corners: Huawei and Qualcomm have signed a multiyear patent cross-license covering 5G, compute, AI, and networking, the first agreement between the two that extends to 5G, according to Huawei. As part of the deal, Qualcomm will also buy a batch of Huawei-owned US patents in compute, AI, and networking. Neither company disclosed financial terms, and the transaction won't close until regulators sign off.
Huawei made its first licensing payment to Qualcomm in 2001, back when it was a telecom gear maker building on other people's wireless standards. Twenty-five years later, the Chinese giant is selling patents to Qualcomm, and Huawei says the deal pushes the cumulative value of its licensing agreements to roughly $7 billion.
The joint announcement is short. It confirms cross-licenses to both portfolios, the US patent purchase, and a commitment to fair licensing. What we don't know: dollar figures, the deal's duration, or which patents are involved.
Each company published the same text with its own executive's quote on top, which says a lot about how differently they're framing it. Qualcomm licensing chief John Han said the deal reaffirms "the success of Qualcomm's 5G SEP licensing program," a nod to the standard-essential patents that drive its royalty business. Huawei's chief IP officer Alan Fan pointed instead to Huawei's own 4G and 5G standards work, singling out polar codes, the error-correction scheme adopted for 5G control channels, as proof of the value of Huawei's innovations.
Huawei added that its IP licensing business has generated positive revenue since 2021 and that it held more than 165,000 active granted patents at the end of 2025. The Qualcomm agreement follows a licensing deal with HP that Huawei announced in August.
Nikkei Asia is reporting that Qualcomm will pay to use Huawei's patents for the first time, framing the cross-license as one that makes Qualcomm the net payer. Bloomberg, citing a Huawei spokesperson, reported that Qualcomm is also licensing patents behind Huawei's LogicFolding chipmaking technique. Neither claim appears in the official statements.
– Anshel Sag (@anshelsag) October 5, 2026
Industry analyst Anshel Sag pushed back on both, noting that the only confirmed payments come from Qualcomm buying Huawei's US patents and that LogicFolding hadn't been mentioned anywhere outside Bloomberg's report. In his words, "The Huawei PR machine is in full swing."
LogicFolding is Huawei's most-hyped chip idea of the year. Unveiled in May, it splits a chip's logic across two stacked tiers joined by hybrid bonding, shortening the longest signal paths instead of shrinking transistors, a workaround for being locked out of EUV lithography. Huawei claims the technique lifted its first LogicFolding Kirin SoC's density from roughly 155 to 238 million transistors per square millimeter, a 55% jump.
The deal also lands while Huawei is on trial in the US, facing racketeering charges that include conspiring to steal trade secrets from US tech companies. Huawei has pleaded not guilty. Still, the irony of a US chip giant buying patents from a company being prosecuted over American IP is hard to miss.
Huawei has been on the Entity List since 2019, so the deal will trigger a regulatory review in the US. Export controls are built to stop technology flowing to Huawei, not money, but a US company paying a blacklisted Chinese firm for AI and compute patents is exactly the kind of transaction that invites scrutiny.
So what's confirmed so far is narrower than the headlines suggest: a mutual promise not to sue, Huawei back under a Qualcomm 5G license, and Qualcomm buying an undisclosed set of Huawei patents for an undisclosed sum.