San Diego-based chipmaker Qualcomm has agreed a major 5G processor supply deal with Apple through to at least 2026.

Qualcomm on Monday said that it had agreed to supply Apple with Snapdragon 5G Modem‑RF Systems for its smartphones to be launched in 2024, 2025 and 2026, extending a pre-existing relationship which started in 2019.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but the chipmaker said that the terms were “similar” to the pair’s previous agreement.

UBS last month estimated that Qualcomm sold $7.26 billion of chips to Apple in 2022.

Qualcomm also said that a patent licencing deal signed with Apple in 2019 remains in place through to 2025 with an option to extend for a further two years.

The announcement answers a major question hanging over the iPhone maker ahead of its 2023 smartphone launch event on 12 September.

The company notably moved to its proprietary silicon for iPhones several generations ago, but the rapidly expiring Qualcomm deal – along with a $1 billion deal to acquire Intel’s modem unit in 2019 – led analysts to speculate whether it would also develop its own networking processors.

Qualcomm itself is bracing itself for a future less dependent on sales to Apple. On Monday, the firm said that its financial projections will assume that only around a fifth of iPhones will use its chips by 2026. However, similar projections were made in 2021 and all iPhone models released in 2022 utilised Qualcomm chips.

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