Amon: AI Not a Bubble for Qualcomm

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm President & CEO speaks with Caroline Hyde from CES in Las Vegas about the future for Qualcomm in the AI era. He shares his thoughts on robotics and autonomous driving cars.

Qualcomm Inc. shares rose to their highest price in 15 months after the company unveiled chips and computers for the lucrative AI data center market, aiming to challenge Nvidia Corp. in the fastest-growing part of the industry.

The company’s new AI200 lineup will start shipping next year, Qualcomm said on Monday. The first customer will be Saudi Arabia’s AI startup Humain, which plans to deploy 200 megawatts’ worth of computing systems based on the chips starting in 2026.

Qualcomm is trying to break into the market for AI accelerators, which are used to create and run artificial intelligence models. It’s an area that’s already transformed the semiconductor industry, with hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on data centers to power AI software and services. The torrid growth has turned market leader Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company.

Qualcomm, the largest maker of smartphone processors, looks to gain a foothold in this market with a different approach. It argues that new memory-related capabilities and the power efficiency of Qualcomm’s designs — that owe their roots to mobile device technology — will attract customers, despite its relatively late entry.

The shares climbed 11% to $187.68, their biggest single-day jump since April and the highest price since July 2024. Arm Holdings Plc, which develops some of the underlying technology used by Qualcomm, gained 4.7% to $178.62 at the close in New York.

The Humain deal suggests there’s “early traction” for Qualcomm’s new AI accelerators, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kunjan Sobhani and Oscar Hernandez Tejada said in a note.

“Though it’s too soon to call this a serious challenge to Nvidia’s dominance, even modest share gains in the over $500 billion AI accelerator market could translate into billions in incremental revenue,” they said.

Qualcomm’s AI200 product will be offered in a range of forms: a standalone component, cards that can be added into existing machines or as part of a full rack of servers provided by Qualcomm. Those debut products will be followed by the AI250 in 2027, the San Diego company said.

If supplied only as a chip, the component could work inside gear that’s based on processors from Nvidia or other rivals. As a full server, it will compete with offerings from those chipmakers.

The new offerings are built around a neural processing unit, a type of chip that debuted in smartphones and is designed to speed up AI-related workloads without killing battery life. That capability has been developed further through Qualcomm’s move into laptop chips and has no

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