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 ?

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.

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.

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.