On 7 October, the open-source hardware community woke up to surprising news. Qualcomm, the tech giant behind the Snapdragon chips found in billions of smartphones, tablets, and laptops worldwide, had acquired Arduino, an Italian hardware company known for its open-source microcontrollers and educational electronics starter kits.

The announcement came out of nowhere. Arduino wasn’t known to be courting a buyer, and no hint or rumor of the deal leaked beforehand—a rarity for any tech acquisition brokered in 2025. It left fans of Arduino and open-source hardware concerned about what it means for Arduino’s future.

“It was a great surprise,” says Alex Norman, a battery management systems designer who runs EETEngineer, a YouTube channel covering PCB and battery pack design. “To have them be bought out by a huge tech company like Qualcomm just floored me. I don’t think anyone saw that coming.”

Perhaps anticipating skepticism from the open-source community, the acquisition was announced alongside a new board: the Arduino Uno Q. It pairs a Qualcomm Dragonwing system-on-a-chip (SoC) with a microcontroller like that on prior Arduino boards. And according to Manvinder Singh, the vice president of industrial IoT at Qualcomm, the company will make the Dragonwing SoC available for purchase in small quantities by end users—a first for the chip.

Arduino’s Open-Source Hardware Origins

Arduino was founded in 2005 by a team of five academics associated with Italy’s Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. The company was named after a local bar.

The company hoped to make electronics prototyping easier to access with widely available, inexpensive open-source hardware capable of executing code written in Arduino’s slightly customized variant of the C++ programming language. It was a success. Arduino sold roughly 300,000 boards by 2011; by 2021 that had grown to over 10 million.

Even so, the acquisition seems odd at first glance. Qualcomm sells expensive, high-performance SoC designs meant for flagship smartphones and PCs. Arduino sells microcontroller boards that often cost less than a large cheese pizza.

“When I first heard about it, I was scratching my head,” says Leonard Lee, an executive analyst and founder at neXt Curve. However, he notes, Qualcomm has aspirations to increase its presence in low-cost, special-purpose electronics. “Their angle is a larger, ecosystem perspective…. It’s part of their industrial IoT play.”

Arduino is the latest in a series of acquisitions aimed at that goal. Qualcomm previously bought Edge Impulse, a platform for building and deploying AI models, and Foundries.io, which provides an over-the-air update infrastructure for IoT devices.

Singh says the company is also interested in Arduino’s massive developer community. The Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which can be used to program its boards**, **saw over 36 million downloads in just the past year.

Singh explains that Qualcomm has experience working one-on-one with other large companies to develop silicon for finished consumer electronics devices, such as smartphones. But he believes that IoT devices, which are often more specialized and sold in smaller volumes, require a different approach.

The company wants to create an ecosystem where developers can “use one of our development kits to build prototypes, can source the silicon from a distributor, and go and build everything on their own—without or with very little help from Qualcomm,” says Singh.

The Arduino Uno Q is an all-in-one board for programming the on-board microcontroller. Arduino

Big Tech Buyout Raises Open-Source Hackles

The acquisition announcement was met with skepticism in the open-source community. YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who frequently covers open-source hardware, posted a short video about the purchase hours after it was announced. The video now has over 650,000 views and 1,600 comments—the vast majority of them negative.

Norman thinks the community is concerned that a giant tech company like Qualcomm will tilt Arduino’s culture toward industrial and enterprise projects. Though Arduino is often a starting point for prototypes that eventually become products, at least as many Arduino projects are focused on education and experimentation.

He also mentions that tying Arduino to Qualcomm hardware could make boards more difficult for individuals to buy. “Qualcomm is a business-to-business entity that is a closed ecosystem,” Norman says. “If you’re in the DIY community and you build something around a Qualcomm chip, you can’t get those chips as an individual. You can’t order them from Digi-Key or Mouser; they are just not available.”

Qualcomm’s Singh addressed those concerns directly. When asked if Qualcomm will make it possible to order small quantities of its own chips, including SoCs, for custom PCB designs, he replied, “You can rest assured the chips will be available.”

Arduino’s leadership, for its part, echoes Singh’s response with a promise that its boards will continue to be affordable and easy to purchase. “Arduino was born open, and it will stay open,” says Fabio Violante, CEO of Arduino. “The licenses for our software, our public repositories, our documentation, and our examples all remain as accessible as before.” He added that Arduino will continue to support boards that use chips from vendors other than Qualcomm.

Qualcomm hopes the Arduino acquisition will make its chips easier to use in IoT devices.Arduino

Introducing the Arduino Uno Q Board

Past Arduino Uno boards had inexpensive microcontrollers that could execute code but lacked support for a full desktop operating system. The Uno Q, by contrast, combines a Qualcomm Dragonwing SoC with a microcontroller, up to 4 gigabytes of RAM, and up to 32 gigabytes of embedded Multi-Media Card (eMMC) storage. ****

That means the Uno Q can boot into Linux and function as a single-board computer with all the features you’d expect, including long-term storage, networking, and peripheral connectivity. It’s more like the popular Raspberry Pi than past Uno boards—though compared to the Raspberry Pi 5, the Uno Q is both less performant and less expensive.

While it’s a single-board computer, the Uno Q still has a microcontroller, which can be accessed and programmed while booted into Linux. Arduino has also introduced a new integrated development environment called App Lab. The combination of Qualcomm SoC, microcontroller, and App Lab IDE makes it a one-stop shop for Arduino development. App Lab is also available for Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.

And, of course, there’s an AI angle. Qualcomm says the Dragonwing SoC’s integrated Adreno GPU makes it well suited for lightweight AI tasks, and App Lab will provide code building blocks (called “bricks”) with embed AI models.

Whether this will satisfy Arduino’s community remains to be seen. For now, engineers and makers are watching closely to see if the marriage of a multinational chipmaker and a beloved open-source hardware company can work.

“The last thing I think Qualcomm wants to do is undermine the developer community,” says Lee. “Because the developer community is not an asset you’re buying. It’s fickle and it can disappear immediately if you make the wrong move.”