The problem is that Qualcomm-ARM may already have a license contract that's a superset of Nuvia-ARM.

Depending on the wording of Qualcomm's architectural ARM license, it seems like that might cover Nuvia's IP?

Or in other words, if anyone who wasn't an ARM architectural licensee bought Nuvia, Nuvia's IP would have been unusable.

But because someone with a "do anything custom with this core" bought Nuvia, Qualcomm effectively bought some "anything custom".

The real IP needle in this haystack seems to be: what ARM IP did Nuvia use that Qualcomm doesn't already have an architectural license for? I.e. extra sauce ARM shared with them for their specific use case.

Which sets up for a SCO-Unix-style threshing of technical details for individual pieces.

Which I imagine both ARM and Qualcomm will eventually want to avoid, as they'd like to continue doing business together, so this will eventually collapse into a new licensing agreement that covers all claims. (Assuming neither pisses the other off badly enough to salt the earth)