I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.
To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.
I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.
Google "Huawei Nortel Networks". The fact is that Nortel has an enormous volume of R&D stolen from them and the allegation is that Chinese telecom providers were the main beneficiaries.
Edited: To reply to a child post, this is about the allegations referred to in the parent, not a statement of what I think is true now
My mom worked at Nortel in the 1990s at their Ottawa R&D campus. As a teenager visiting, I asked about corporate espionage, hoping for a story about Cisco or something. Every one of her co-workers just belted out "China" at the same time. It was apparently an open secret that the Chinese were hoovering up IP and management didn't care. It's a bit of a shame as Nortel's telecom kit was considered top-notch (especially the cellular stuff), but it gave the Chinese an enormous amount of help catching up.
That being said, the Chinese then went off and innovated off of it and Nortel imploded, mostly due to other poor management reasons. My mom was at least smart enough to cash out most of her equity as she got them, though. Lotta people lost everything.
The patents they built today are founded on the patents they derived stealing from nortel. Qualcomm needs these whitewashed patents as part of this frand deal.
Nortel's patents were among the first that were critical to modern MIMO OFDM (they really were on to the future in that sense, it's not hyperbole), but most never went to Qualcomm or Huawei. When Nortel went belly-up a consortium called Rockstar co-owned by Microsoft, RIM and a few others ended up buying them for a hefty price (more than $4 billion). It's possible some of them have made their way over to Qualcomm or Huawei as part of sales over the years I guess.
Charitable interpretation is Huawei actually had R&D + academic linkages in Canada (was expanding aggressively globally), but Canada still drop in bucket, Canada R&D headcount peaked ~1k vs ~100k in PRC. Post sanction, Canada basically siloed from doing crown jewel work anyway.
The alternative would be trying to file court cases outside the US for Qualcomm, which is where Huawei does most of its business and infringing.
There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.
Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.
That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.
They're not giving it away, rather they're essentially forming a patent oligopoly. Huawei and Qualcomm together hold the bulk of patents for 5G. It's of no value to them to try to litigate against each other. Here they're getting a cross-licensing deal that will solidify their patent licensing wall/revenues.
It's a hard area for the government to navigate because IP is designed to confer monopoly power. As long as Qualcomm walks a careful line on licensing costs/behaviour, they probably think the risk of being the target of antitrust sanctions is limited or manageable.
Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though.
AFAIK, a lot of the Ericsson and Nokia patents are legacy. Companies still need to license them, but they're not targeted at the latest generation of 5G polar codes, MIMO OFDM implementations, etc. Not sure about Samsung.
Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth.
That's now how standards work - to become 5g the tech needs to be implementable by everyone at a FRAND cost (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Sharing patents just means Qualcomm and Huawei won't bill each other.
Huawei is a massive R&D company - I'm sure they're contributing as much as Qualcomm
IIRC US/BIS carved out exemptions for intangibles like SEP patent licenses. Entity list for controlled goods export/import. Regardless, US would also be stupid not to pay Huawei, PRC pays $4 for every $1 she receives for IP, ~30B deficit, most to US. PRC takes home more $$$ if US tries to lawfare it's way out of paying. But bigger stick is PRC entrenched in supply chains enough that Huawei (with PRC pressure) can sue OEMs (patent enforcement happens at device level)... all domestic PRC manufactures, foxconn, samsung, apple (really anyone that uses PRC supply chains at all) on chopping block, i.e. functionally global sales injunction against any 3/4/5g hardware that uses QC which has to use HW SEPs, which covers their entire portfolio... mobile, auto, iot, edge comptue... aka QC dead if it doesn't pay.
Big companies were sometimes getting sanction waivers. In energy, Exxon for example has been getting waivers to keep investing in Russian oil and gas since 2014. They got out in 2022 though, and the waivers stopped (I've no idea which ended first, the waivers or Exxon's interest in those projects).
Pre sanctions, HW fine buying QC for mobile chipset StandardEssentialPatentswhile QC pay HW for 5g SEPs, with net balance favoring QC. Huawei indigenized mobile SoC + 5g hardware with Kirin 9000 in 2023. Hilariously, now that Huawei weaned off QC SoC... QC simply stuck net paying Huawei.
This is less surprising if you view telecom patents as a mutual-assured-infringement system rather than a moat for any single company. As others noted, Qualcomm (~$5B/yr in licensing), Huawei, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia all hold overlapping SEPs for 5G — polar codes, massive MIMO, OFDM variants — so nobody can ship a compliant radio without infringing someone. Cross-licenses are the equilibrium: litigating everywhere Huawei actually sells (outside the US) would be ruinously expensive for Qualcomm, and Huawei needs Qualcomm's portfolio for handsets and IoT.
The interesting questions for me: 1) what FRAND rate they settled on, since that becomes a comp for future deals with smaller OEMs who don't have a portfolio to trade, and 2) how Entity List / regulatory approvals shape the structure — the announcement says closing follows regulatory approvals, which suggests carve-outs around what's actually transferable vs. pure patent peace. For startups the takeaway is sobering: the "patent wall" effect mentioned here means you're licensing from an oligopoly whether you build infrastructure or devices.
Neither company can ship modern cellular basebands or RAN silicon without stepping on the other's portfolio. FRAND terms make endless global litigation a negative-ROI exercise, Entity List or not. Cross-licensing is the only operational path to extract rents and lock third parties out.
Here in Europe, the Unified Patent Court just rubberstamped software patents with a smartwatch decision, saying adding a button makes the whole thing patentable, even though it's only software.
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central Unitary patent court (UPC), which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators."
Not to mention the judges in that court are part time working for Nokia or Airbus.
Chinese phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm hardware generally do respect the royalty system. Though they pay a lower total royalty because of a 2015 antitrust action in China, which forced Qualcomm to calculate royalties on 65% of the net selling price of devices sold for use in China, rather than 100% used in most of the rest of the world. (For those unfamiliar, Qualcomm's royalties are not a flat fee per device/modem, they're calculated as a percentage of the total selling price of the finished device, sometimes with a negotiated cap.)
China is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.
Huawei likely wants to manufacture global-market devices with the technology immediately, and have the technology baked into the devices at the time of patent expiration.
Remember when they were telling us how important the 5G race was and how critical was for the US to lead it?
And now they are just giving it away ?
I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.
To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.
I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.
https://insights.greyb.com/5g-patent-landscape/
Huawei gets a lot of research output from its many Canadian Research and Development centres
HN is enamored with the reddit-style of thought that China can only ever steal from Western research.
Like nortel?
what are you implying here ??? they steal it from Canada RnD ??
Google "Huawei Nortel Networks". The fact is that Nortel has an enormous volume of R&D stolen from them and the allegation is that Chinese telecom providers were the main beneficiaries.
Edited: To reply to a child post, this is about the allegations referred to in the parent, not a statement of what I think is true now
My mom worked at Nortel in the 1990s at their Ottawa R&D campus. As a teenager visiting, I asked about corporate espionage, hoping for a story about Cisco or something. Every one of her co-workers just belted out "China" at the same time. It was apparently an open secret that the Chinese were hoovering up IP and management didn't care. It's a bit of a shame as Nortel's telecom kit was considered top-notch (especially the cellular stuff), but it gave the Chinese an enormous amount of help catching up.
That being said, the Chinese then went off and innovated off of it and Nortel imploded, mostly due to other poor management reasons. My mom was at least smart enough to cash out most of her equity as she got them, though. Lotta people lost everything.
That was two decades ago. Things have changed a lot since then.
The patents they built today are founded on the patents they derived stealing from nortel. Qualcomm needs these whitewashed patents as part of this frand deal.
Nortel's patents were among the first that were critical to modern MIMO OFDM (they really were on to the future in that sense, it's not hyperbole), but most never went to Qualcomm or Huawei. When Nortel went belly-up a consortium called Rockstar co-owned by Microsoft, RIM and a few others ended up buying them for a hefty price (more than $4 billion). It's possible some of them have made their way over to Qualcomm or Huawei as part of sales over the years I guess.
Charitable interpretation is Huawei actually had R&D + academic linkages in Canada (was expanding aggressively globally), but Canada still drop in bucket, Canada R&D headcount peaked ~1k vs ~100k in PRC. Post sanction, Canada basically siloed from doing crown jewel work anyway.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-my...
The alternative would be trying to file court cases outside the US for Qualcomm, which is where Huawei does most of its business and infringing.
There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.
Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.
That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.
They're not giving it away, rather they're essentially forming a patent oligopoly. Huawei and Qualcomm together hold the bulk of patents for 5G. It's of no value to them to try to litigate against each other. Here they're getting a cross-licensing deal that will solidify their patent licensing wall/revenues.
Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.
No corporations would enter an agreement that is pro-competition, doesn’t make sense. That’s where government needs to step up and provide some value
It's a hard area for the government to navigate because IP is designed to confer monopoly power. As long as Qualcomm walks a careful line on licensing costs/behaviour, they probably think the risk of being the target of antitrust sanctions is limited or manageable.
Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though.
Asking Gemini it seems their patents covers about 25% of the number of applicable patents, behind them is Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia.
No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years.
AFAIK, a lot of the Ericsson and Nokia patents are legacy. Companies still need to license them, but they're not targeted at the latest generation of 5G polar codes, MIMO OFDM implementations, etc. Not sure about Samsung.
Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth.
I think Nokia would probably disagree. I'd guess a large part of their $6B research budget goes on 5g and 6g related tech.
> Nokia reaches 7,000 patent families declared as essential to 5G
https://www.nokia.com/newsroom/nokia-reaches-7000-patent-fam...
> And now they are just giving it away ?
That's now how standards work - to become 5g the tech needs to be implementable by everyone at a FRAND cost (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Sharing patents just means Qualcomm and Huawei won't bill each other.
Huawei is a massive R&D company - I'm sure they're contributing as much as Qualcomm
I think this is the other way around.
Huawei has been leading in 5G deployments until US decides him and his allies cannot be friends with Huawei.
Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.
Leading in 5G deployments yet cannot make a 5G phone?
Nokia and Ericsson is leading telecommunications without making 5G phones.
I'm not talking about the company which makes "Nokia Phones". I'm talking about Nokia the infrastructure company.
Which nowadays owns the birthplace of UNIX.
HUAWEI Mate 20 X 5G was launched in 2019, so what exactly are you referencing here?
?
They've been making their own 5g phones since 2023 (mate 60)
The point is that this allows QC to sell chips in China without royalty.
Everyone else wrote the 5G specs but Huawei built the hardware.
The US will never lead 5G because many key patents there are owned by Huawei. Same for 6G. They're just now acknowledging reality.
The US sanctions itself out of the game. I m afraid if the trend continues, it may sanction itself out of the rest of the world.
maybe 6g is on the way and they don't care about 5g anymore.
Nortel 2.0.
Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.
Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.
It's not mentioned on Huawei page, but this bloomberg article claims that the focus in on LogicFolding architecture https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/qualcomm-...
Aren't Huawei on the Entity List? How can Qualcomm enter into agreements like this without getting into massive hot water?
IIRC US/BIS carved out exemptions for intangibles like SEP patent licenses. Entity list for controlled goods export/import. Regardless, US would also be stupid not to pay Huawei, PRC pays $4 for every $1 she receives for IP, ~30B deficit, most to US. PRC takes home more $$$ if US tries to lawfare it's way out of paying. But bigger stick is PRC entrenched in supply chains enough that Huawei (with PRC pressure) can sue OEMs (patent enforcement happens at device level)... all domestic PRC manufactures, foxconn, samsung, apple (really anyone that uses PRC supply chains at all) on chopping block, i.e. functionally global sales injunction against any 3/4/5g hardware that uses QC which has to use HW SEPs, which covers their entire portfolio... mobile, auto, iot, edge comptue... aka QC dead if it doesn't pay.
Big companies were sometimes getting sanction waivers. In energy, Exxon for example has been getting waivers to keep investing in Russian oil and gas since 2014. They got out in 2022 though, and the waivers stopped (I've no idea which ended first, the waivers or Exxon's interest in those projects).
With the current state of the U.S politics, nothing is sure.
They can just donate some crypto to one of the Trump kids to get it approved…
Two patent thieves partner up.
Patents that are only going to be used for trolling shouldn't be granted in the first place.
How the turntables etc.
Pre sanctions, HW fine buying QC for mobile chipset StandardEssentialPatentswhile QC pay HW for 5g SEPs, with net balance favoring QC. Huawei indigenized mobile SoC + 5g hardware with Kirin 9000 in 2023. Hilariously, now that Huawei weaned off QC SoC... QC simply stuck net paying Huawei.
...potentially resulting in new AI-relevant chips.
Haha next Nortel waiting to happen?
Qualcomm doing sneaky stuff as usual. Nothing more
Qualcomm is a patent troll, boycott.
Good luck finding chips that don't use any Qualcomm IP.
That's easy.
Now, a chip that doesn't pay the troll toll to Qualcomm, AND ships with a cellular modem? That's hard.
Cartels.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunic... lol
"This transaction will close following receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals"
Binance has entered the chat.
Patents serve cartels. Good luck for innovative startups trying to enter this rigged game.
Thanks Trump
This is less surprising if you view telecom patents as a mutual-assured-infringement system rather than a moat for any single company. As others noted, Qualcomm (~$5B/yr in licensing), Huawei, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia all hold overlapping SEPs for 5G — polar codes, massive MIMO, OFDM variants — so nobody can ship a compliant radio without infringing someone. Cross-licenses are the equilibrium: litigating everywhere Huawei actually sells (outside the US) would be ruinously expensive for Qualcomm, and Huawei needs Qualcomm's portfolio for handsets and IoT.
The interesting questions for me: 1) what FRAND rate they settled on, since that becomes a comp for future deals with smaller OEMs who don't have a portfolio to trade, and 2) how Entity List / regulatory approvals shape the structure — the announcement says closing follows regulatory approvals, which suggests carve-outs around what's actually transferable vs. pure patent peace. For startups the takeaway is sobering: the "patent wall" effect mentioned here means you're licensing from an oligopoly whether you build infrastructure or devices.
Standard SEP mutual assured destruction.
Neither company can ship modern cellular basebands or RAN silicon without stepping on the other's portfolio. FRAND terms make endless global litigation a negative-ROI exercise, Entity List or not. Cross-licensing is the only operational path to extract rents and lock third parties out.
Ah yes, Huawei, that well known adherent to patent agreements.
Patents just embed western monopolies and cost everyone except the sovereign wealth funds and private equity that own everything in the west.
Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side.
Here in Europe, the Unified Patent Court just rubberstamped software patents with a smartwatch decision, saying adding a button makes the whole thing patentable, even though it's only software.
Like FFII.org predicted in 2006:
https://ffii.org/
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central Unitary patent court (UPC), which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators."
Not to mention the judges in that court are part time working for Nokia or Airbus.
You know, at this scale law, is more like suggestion if benefits of not following it are better.
Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85n2vyleo)
You can ask AI to summarise the list of when for example apple ignored patents. I get 16 cases.
Chinese phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm hardware generally do respect the royalty system. Though they pay a lower total royalty because of a 2015 antitrust action in China, which forced Qualcomm to calculate royalties on 65% of the net selling price of devices sold for use in China, rather than 100% used in most of the rest of the world. (For those unfamiliar, Qualcomm's royalties are not a flat fee per device/modem, they're calculated as a percentage of the total selling price of the finished device, sometimes with a negotiated cap.)
China is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.
What a strange sarcasm, nobody's forcing Qualcomm to do this.
QC will send them a sad emoji if their patents are violated in China.
The patents are violatable now.
Huawei likely wants to manufacture global-market devices with the technology immediately, and have the technology baked into the devices at the time of patent expiration.
They will be shocked. SHOCKED.
This tells you that China:
1. is no longer a threat for the US
2. no longer has (perhaps never had), the lead
3. was forced to bow down because has no leverage
The US still chooses what customers China has access to