Make compromises: Huawei and Qualcomm have signed a multi-year reciprocal patent license covering 5G, computing, AI and networking. Huawei says this is the first agreement between the two that extends to 5G. As part of the deal, Qualcomm will also buy a number of Huawei-owned U.S. patents in computing, AI and networking. Neither company disclosed financial terms and the transaction will not close until regulators approve.
Huawei made its first royalty payment to Qualcomm in 2001, when the company was still a telecommunications equipment maker that built on other people’s cellular standards. 25 years later, the Chinese giant is selling patents to Qualcomm, and Huawei says the deal brings the total value of its licensing agreements to about $7 billion.
The joint announcement is short. It confirms the cross-licensing of both portfolios, the US patent purchase and the commitment to fair licensing. What we don’t know: dollar figures, the length of the deal or which patents are involved.
Each company published the same text with their own executive’s quote above it, which says a lot about how differently they worded it. John Han, Qualcomm’s licensing chief, said the deal “validates the success of Qualcomm’s 5G SEP licensing program” and is a nod to the standards-essential patents that drive the company’s licensing business. Huawei Chief IP Officer Alan Fan instead pointed to Huawei’s own work on 4G and 5G standards and highlighted Polarcodes, the error correction scheme for 5G control channels, as evidence of the value of Huawei’s innovations.
Huawei added that its IP licensing business has been generating positive revenue since 2021 and that the company had more than 165,000 active issued patents at the end of 2025. The Qualcomm agreement follows a licensing deal with HP that Huawei announced in August.
Nikkei Asia reports that Qualcomm will pay for the use of Huawei’s patents for the first time, describing the cross-license as one that makes Qualcomm a net payer. Bloomberg reported, citing a Huawei spokesperson, that Qualcomm also licenses patents behind Huawei’s LogicFolding chip manufacturing technique. Neither claim appears in the official statements.
– Anshel Sag (@anshelsag) October 5, 2026
Industry analyst Anshel Sag rejected both, noting that the only confirmed payments came from Qualcomm’s purchase of Huawei’s U.S. patents and that LogicFolding was not mentioned anywhere outside of the Bloomberg 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 into two stacked layers connected by hybrid bonding. This shortens the longest signal paths instead of making the transistors smaller – a workaround for exclusion from EUV lithography. Huawei claims the technique increased the density of its first LogicFolding Kirin SoC from about 155 to 238 million transistors per square millimeter, a jump of 55%.
The deal also comes as Huawei stands trial in the US facing racketeering charges, including conspiring to steal trade secrets from US technology companies. Huawei pleaded not guilty. Still, the irony of a U.S. chip giant buying patents from a company facing prosecution over American intellectual property is hard to ignore.
Since Huawei has been on the Entity List since 2019, the deal will trigger regulatory scrutiny in the US. Export controls are designed to prevent technology, not money, from flowing to Huawei, but a U.S. company paying a blacklisted Chinese company for AI and computer patents is exactly the kind of transaction that invites scrutiny.
So what’s been confirmed so far is tighter than the headlines suggest: a mutual promise not to sue, Huawei getting a Qualcomm 5G license again, and Qualcomm buying a number of Huawei patents for an undisclosed sum.
