Qualcomm could soon be serving up RISC-V cores alongside its custom Arm ones after snapping up Ventana Micro Systems on Wednesday. The deal gives the San Diego chip giant a ready-made line of high-performance RISC-V designs aimed at datacenter and enterprise workloads, right as it preps a return to server CPUs.
Founded in 2018, Ventana has spent the past several years cranking out successive generations of RISC-V CPU chiplets tuned for big iron rather than hobby boards. Its designs target cloud, enterprise, and edge deployments where performance per watt and scalability matter more than bare-metal tinkering.
Qualcomm isn’t disclosing what it paid for Ventana, but it does say it plans to keep developing Ventana’s RISC-V cores in parallel with its custom Arm-based Oryon cores, which already power the Snapdragon X-series PC chips. In other words, this isn’t a pivot away from Arm so much as a second CPU track.
“We believe the RISC-V instruction set architecture has the potential to advance the frontier on CPU technology, enabling innovation across products,” said Durga Malladi, executive VP of technology planning, edge solutions and datacenter at Qualcomm. “The acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems marks a pivotal step in our journey to deliver industry-leading RISC-V-based CPU technology across products.”
Qualcomm’s long RISC-V courtship
This isn’t Qualcomm’s first dance with RISC-V. The company has been experimenting with the ISA for years and has already shipped RISC-V microcontrollers inside its SoCs — going back to the Snapdragon 865 in 2019 — for tasks like power management and sensor hubs.
In 2023, Qualcomm announced a collaboration with Google to build low-power, high-performance RISC-V chips for Wear OS devices. That effort is focused on wearables, but it showed Qualcomm was willing to invest in RISC-V beyond internal housekeeping cores.
Buying Ventana, though, points to a much more ambitious class of RISC-V CPUs — ones that can realistically go toe-to-toe with server-grade Arm and x86 silicon.
Inside Ventana’s Veyron V2 and V3 cores
Ventana’s current flagship is the Veyron V2 chiplet. Each chiplet houses up to 32 RISC-V RVA23-compatible CPU cores clocked at up to 3.85 GHz, with up to 1.5 MB of private L2 cache per core and 128 MB of shared L3 per cluster.
Each core also carries:
- A 512-bit vector unit implementing the RVV 1.0 spec
- A custom matrix math accelerator aimed at AI and machine learning workloads
Ventana rates the matrix unit at 0.5 TOPS (INT8) per GHz per core, giving a fully populated V2 chiplet a healthy amount of on-die AI throughput before you even bolt on external accelerators.
For higher-end deployments, Ventana’s architecture allows multiple V2 chiplets to be stitched together into a system-in-package, scaling out core counts and memory while reusing the same building blocks.
Ventana previously guided that V2 silicon would enter production in the second half of 2024. More recent material on its website now lists early 2026 as the expected availability window, suggesting timelines have slipped or been updated as the design matured.
Looking past V2, Ventana has already teased Veyron V3 chiplets with higher clocks — up to 4.2 GHz — and an upgraded matrix engine that adds FP8 support for more efficient AI training and inference. Qualcomm hasn’t said whether its first RISC-V products will lean on V2, wait for V3, or blend both.
Back to the datacenter
Qualcomm has been here before, at least in spirit. The company once tried to crack the server market with its Centriq Arm CPUs, only to pull the plug around 2018 when the business failed to gain enough traction.
In May 2025, at Computex, Qualcomm publicly confirmed it was returning to the datacenter CPU arena. Those future chips are widely expected to be based on core technologies picked up with the acquisition of Nuvia, an Arm CPU startup that had originally targeted server applications before Qualcomm bought it in 2021.
For now, Qualcomm hasn’t committed to any specific timelines or product names for chips based on Ventana’s RISC-V IP. But it’s easy to imagine a roadmap where Oryon-based Arm parts and Ventana-derived RISC-V parts coexist — perhaps targeting different customers, workloads, or regions.
The Arm drama in the background
The Nuvia deal came with baggage. In 2022, Arm sued Qualcomm, alleging that Qualcomm’s use of Nuvia’s core designs violated Arm license terms. The two sides have been locked in a sprawling legal fight ever since.
A Delaware jury in December 2024 largely sided with Qualcomm, finding that the company had not breached its main Arm architecture license (the jury deadlocked on one Nuvia-specific license question). Then, in late September / early October 2025, the trial judge issued a final judgment in Qualcomm’s favor, rejecting Arm’s post-trial motions and effectively ending Arm’s case at the district-court level. Arm has said it plans to appeal that ruling to a higher court.
Qualcomm, for its part, has launched its own countersuit accusing Arm of breaching contracts and engaging in anti-competitive behavior. That case is still working its way through the system.
All of which makes the Ventana buy strategically interesting. If Qualcomm’s relationship with Arm were to deteriorate further — or if Arm tried to tighten licensing terms for future designs — having a high-performance RISC-V option in-house gives Qualcomm more leverage and a potential escape hatch.
A second CPU pillar
For now, Qualcomm insists this isn’t about abandoning Arm. Oryon remains central to its PC, mobile, and likely upcoming datacenter CPU plans. But with Ventana, Qualcomm gains a credible RISC-V story that goes far beyond microcontrollers and wearables.
If everything goes to plan, future Qualcomm roadmaps could show two parallel CPU pillars: custom Arm cores derived from Nuvia and high-end RISC-V cores descended from Ventana’s Veyron line. That might make Qualcomm’s silicon more attractive to hyperscalers and infrastructure buyers who want architectural diversity — or who are wary of becoming too dependent on any single CPU ecosystem.
And if the legal skirmishes with Arm drag on, Qualcomm now has another card to play. RISC-V won’t replace Arm overnight, but with Ventana in the fold, Qualcomm is clearly preparing for a world where it doesn’t have to ask Arm’s permission to keep pushing the CPU frontier.