Any company that makes Arm chips must license technology from Arm Holdings plc, the British company that develops the instruction set. Companies can license the instruction set and create their own CPU designs or license one of Arm's ready-made Cortex CPU core designs to incorporate into their own chips.

Arm has finally thrown its toys and given 60 days notice that it intends to cancel Qualcomm's licence to produce chips based on Arm technology. So says Bloomberg, which claims to have seen Arm documents detailing the move.

Arm’s notice of the upcoming license cancellation comes about two years after it sued Qualcomm over the latter company’s acquisition of startup Nuvia Inc. for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was founded in 2019 by a team that included the former head of Apple Inc.’s CPU design team. Like Qualcomm, Apple uses Arm’s ISA to power its CPUs.