Qualcomm enters data center market with Dragonfly chips, eyes smartphone integration

Qualcomm Darts Into the Data Center Business With Dragonfly

The company behind the processors in many of the smallest computers people use is making a bid to enter some of the largest computers in operation today. Qualcomm used its investor day event in New York this week to unwrap a new family of components for data centers. "We have a comprehensive portfolio to enter the next phase of the data center market," CEO Cristiano Amon said near the start of the roughly 3-hour event. "We're going to become a full-stack player in physical AI, compute, everywhere." The San Diego company's new data-center portfolio includes multiple new processors -- the Dragonfly C1000 CPU and the Dragonfly AI300 "interfence accelerator," following the already-announced AI200 and AI200 accelerators -- plus a proprietary High-Bandwidth Compute (HBC) architecture, new electric and optical connectivity products, and custom silicon options for customers. Tony Pialis, Qualcomm's EVP and GM for data center, said the company will bring the connectivity portfolio to market this year, followed next year by the new AI accelerator and custom silicon products, and then the new CPU in 2028. He spent much of his time on stage outlining how HBC's tight coupling of memory and processing could fix what he called the "memory bottleneck" in data-center architectures that separate processors from optimized memory technologies such as HBM (high-bandwidth memory) and SRAM (static RAM). "We can deploy multiple HBC stacks within a single compute device using standard packaging," Pialis said before ticking off such performance advantages as a 200x increase in capacity per watt compared with SRAM and a 6x increase in bandwidth per watt on large workloads compared with HBM. Another Push for 'Superintelligence' Qualcomm announced two top-tier data-center partners, Microsoft and Meta. "HBC implements an innovative architecture, with high memory bandwidth and integrated compute, that unlocks significant improvements in cost and performance for the next generation of AI infrastructure, and there is so much more to come," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video clip. "We are excited about your innovation in the data center, especially around high-bandwidth compute, and...we look forward to our continued partnership as we build the next generation of computing together." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided a similar plug for Qualcomm in his own video clip, saying the company has "spent decades figuring out how to get the most performance out of every watt." He called Meta's partnership "a multigenerational collaboration" that "will help put personal superintelligence into billions of people's hands." (Zuckerberg began touting "superintelligence" as a goal even before Meta gave up on its "metaverse" aspirations, but it's still not clear what that will mean in the real world beyond putting 10% of Meta's employees out of a job.) "I have not had to push my way into hyperscale customers," Qualcomm's Pialis said. "They've been pulling us in." 'Very Strategic' Partnerships Data centers have become a booming business but also an unpopular one, as people have increasingly objected to their current and future effects on the environment and utility costs. Soaring data-center demand for memory and processors has already driven up costs for consumer hardware; just Thursday, Apple and Microsoft separately announced price hikes. But those concerns were nowhere in sight at Qualcomm's presentation. Qualcomm also announced multiple deals to accelerate its data-center ambitions. It plans to acquire, at an unannounced price, the AI-development startup Modular, and Amon closed out the event by revealing a "very strategic" partnership with the high-profile AI-software firm Hugging Face. Amon said that this collaboration would enable AI firms to deploy new models on Qualcomm's hardware with "zero manual integration work." Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clément Delangue backed that up in a video clip: "You'll be able to take any model, big or small, deploy it optimized on any Qualcomm platform with agents running on device and orchestrating across the cloud." Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm's CFO, COO, and EVP, underscored its data-center goals when he said the company sees a total addressable market there of more than a trillion dollars and wants to secure more than 5% of that market in five to seven years. Beyond data-center dreams, Qualcomm's investor day featured updates on its ventures into smart glasses and other wearables, connected cars, and the still-nascent notion of 6G. All of these moves by Qualcomm into new markets -- see also its earlier expansion into laptop processors -- reflect the company's steadily rising confidence. "When people ask about if it's late to enter the data center, you should think about scale and execution," Amon said. "Our engineering capabilities, our operations and supply chain, it's one of the leading scale and execution machines in the semiconductor industry."

Qualcomm plans to bring data center chip tech to smartphones By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Qualcomm said it plans to use new chip technology developed for data centers in smartphones, which would improve how artificial intelligence runs on mobile devices. Executive Vice President Durga Malladi shared the information in an interview with Semafor. The chipmaker, which supplies smartphones and wearable devices, entered the data center chip industry this week with its announcement of new data center chips. The sector faces supply shortages and strong competition. "What starts in data centers is not going to end there," Malladi said. Stay ahead of every breaking move with real-time news on InvestingPro -- now 50% off. Qualcomm is talking with manufacturers of smartphones, personal computers, and cars about its new data center technology portfolio, Malladi said. The company's High Bandwidth Compute architecture stacks chips vertically instead of placing them side by side, which puts memory and compute closer together. This design improves data speed and flow. The first generation of the new architecture will launch in data centers next year, with commercial availability expected in 2028. Malladi did not say when Qualcomm will add the new technology to other devices. Chip stacking technology exists mainly in data centers rather than smartphones. When it reaches handheld devices, users will be able to run more AI models locally and operate agents in an "always on" mode without draining the battery. Qualcomm had fallen behind in data center technology for several years but holds a strong position due to its long history with smartphone chips.