IN JANUARY last year, Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion on buying Nuvia—that’s a lot for a company barely two years old with few tangible assets. What Nuvia had was expertise in processor design, particularly ARM-based chips, and also several ex-Apple engineers in its ranks.
Qualcomm is a huge, but fabless, manufacturer of processors and other silicon. Its chips power about 30 percent of the world’s smartphones