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Acquisition to combine Qualcomm’s leading-edge products and technologies with Arduino’s vast ecosystem and community to empower businesses, students, entrepreneurs, tech professionals, educators and enthusiasts to quickly and easily bring ideas to life.
New Arduino UNO Q, Arduino’s first dual-brain board powered by the Qualcomm Dragonwing™ platform, bridges high-performance computing with real-time control to enable “AI in a blink.”
Arduino App Lab is a new, integrated development environment that unifies the Arduino journey across Real‑time OS, Linux, Python, and AI flows—simplifying build, test, and deployment.
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. today announced its agreement to acquire Arduino, a premier open-source hardware and software company. The transaction accelerates Qualcomm Technologies’ strategy to empower developers by facilitating access to its unmatched portfolio of edge technologies and products. This acquisition builds on the Company’s recent integrations of Edge Impulse and Foundries.io, reinforcing its commitment to delivering a full-stack edge platform that spans hardware, software, and cloud services. The closing of this transaction is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.
By combining Qualcomm Technologies’ leading‑edge processing, graphics, computer vision, and AI with Arduino’s simplicity, affordability, and community, the Company is poised to supercharge developer productivity across industries. Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step.
Arduino is also an indispensable prototyping tool for embedded engineers.
To me this feels like when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and proceed to effectively kill MySQL, VirtualBox, and OpenOffice, and also ruin the Java ecosystem.
Arduinos will probably end up getting locked to some microcontroller built by QCOM instead of being more of an open source hardware platform.
Arduino is the largest ecosystem for open hardware development, literally billions of Arduino devices are sold a year under an open source reference design.
Qualcomm probably thinks they can make people pay either for the reference design or put their own chips into the designs. As I said earlier, it feels really similar to when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, where Sun had a lot of popular open source projects that had become the standard in internet technology stacks. They basically killed the open source projects that competed with their own and made Java more of a commercial pay to play ecosystem (it was previously completely open source).
