Qualcomm enters data center race with Dragonfly chips, signs Meta and Microsoft as partners
20 Sources
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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
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Qualcomm claims it's not too late for Dragonfly to land in datacenters
We knew it was coming, but now it's official: Qualcomm is making a major push into the datacenter market. And though it is late to the game, the mobile-chip giant believes it can make an impact by delivering a lower total cost of ownership and better performance per watt than rival platforms. It
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Qualcomm says Microsoft, Meta will use its new AI chips
June 24 (Reuters) - Qualcomm (QCOM.O), opens new tab said on Wednesday that Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab will use its new AI chips and that it will make custom chips for two other unnamed "hyperscalers." The San Diego-based company, which is the
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Qualcomm announces AI data center CPU, signs Meta as first major customer
Qualcomm on Wednesday revealed a central processing unit for data centers called Dragonfly C1000, and said that Meta would use it when it starts production in 2028. The chipmaker said that the new data center CPU was built for agentic AI and focuses on offering computing performance without using
[5]
Qualcomm lands Meta as first named customer for its Dragonfly data centre chips
Qualcomm signed Meta as the first customer for its Dragonfly C1000 data centre chip, due in 2028, and confirmed a $3.9bn Modular acquisition. Qualcomm has signed Meta as the first named customer for its new Dragonfly C1000 data centre processor, the strongest signal yet that the mobile chipmaker
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Qualcomm's big AI gamble: Breaking Nvidia's chips stronghold | Fortune
Qualcomm has long been known primarily as the maker of smartphone chips, but since taking the reins five years ago, CEO Cristiano Amon has worked to change that and equip the company for the tough but lucrative AI chip wars. Since 2021, Qualcomm has reinvented itself to become a major player in
[7]
New AI-Boosted Sales Targets Are Driving Qualcomm's Stock Higher Today
Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. Qualcomm shares are gaining Thursday after the chipmaker issued bullish new long-term forecasts amid expectations for continued strong AI demand. Shares of Qualcomm (QCOM), which has spent years as a dominant player in
[8]
Inside Qualcomm's AI Strategy: Opportunities, risks and outlook - Why Qualcomm Is Back in Focus
Inside Qualcomm's AI Strategy: Opportunities, risks & outlook 1/9 Why Qualcomm Is Back in Focus Qualcomm is undergoing a strategic transformation, positioning itself as an AI infrastructure company rather than relying primarily on its smartphone chip business. The company has significantly
[9]
Why Is Qualcomm Stock Gaining Monday? - Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM)
Qualcomm Now Has The Pieces To Compete Across The AI Stack: Analyst The upbeat market backdrop comes as Counterpoint Research said Qualcomm is becoming one of the few semiconductor companies capable of delivering end-to-end AI infrastructure, spanning hyperscale data centers and edge devices. AI
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Qualcomm Dragonfly Ecosystem Enables AI Accelerators, Custom Silicon, Networking To Empower Next-Gen AI Factories With A One-Stop & Scaled Compute Platform
Qualcomm Dragonfly brings a robust platform of AI Compute accelerators, CPUs, breakthrough technologies, networking, & custom-silicon under one roof. Enter The Dragon - Qualcomm's New Dragonfly Brand Is Primed For AI, Offering A Full-Stack Datacenter Portfolio, Encompassing Connectivity, CPU, and
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Qualcomm's AI Leap: New chips, meta partnership and the road ahead - Qualcomm's Biggest AI Bet Yet
Qualcomm's AI Leap: New chips, meta partnership & the road ahead 1/10 Qualcomm's Biggest AI Bet Yet Qualcomm has unveiled a new family of AI data center chips and systems, marking its biggest expansion beyond smartphones. With Meta signing on as its first major hyperscale customer, the company
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Qualcomm Stock Soars On 2029 Guidance, Data Center Revenue To Hit $15 Billion - Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:ME
On Wednesday, Qualcomm outlined its new diversification efforts with a key data center strategy. The new growth strategy adds to efforts with AI devices, automobiles, and robotics, in an effort to lower its reliance on handset revenue. "It's time to start a new chapter at Qualcomm," Qualcomm CEO
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Qualcomm Claims Single-Core Leadership for Its First Server CPU, the Dragonfly C1000, Delivering 250+ Cores & 5 GHz By 2028
Qualcomm has introduced its first-ever CPU designed for Data Centers, the Dragonfly C1000, which leverages the Oryon architecture. Qualcomm Enters The Agentic AI CPU Race With Dragonfly C1000 Chip, Oryon-Based With Over 5 GHz Clocks, Over 250 Cores, & Aims To Achieve Single-Core Leadership One of
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Qualcomm introduces Dragonfly C1000 data center CPU, Dragonfly AI300 Accelerator and more
At its annual Investor Day, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced a major expansion into full-stack data center infrastructure, debuting a roadmap of AI-focused processors, custom silicon solutions, and high-speed connectivity products. The hardware portfolio -- spanning the Qualcomm Dragonfly
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Qualcomm Pivots to Datacentre Chips, Forecasts $15Bn in Sales by 2029
The shift from smartphones to datacentre solutions is a result of companies like Apple using their own processors in their handheld devices Tech giant Qualcomm would be expanding into the lucrative AI and datacentre market with a new range of processors under the Dragonfly range. The company is
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AI chips: Qualcomm forecasts $15 billion data center chip sales by 2029, shares soar
Qualcomm also said it expects $40 billion in revenue from chips outside its smartphone stronghold by 2029, up from previous estimates of $22 billion, and with handsets only making up a third of its chip revenue by then. Qualcomm said it expects to generate $15 billion in sales from its data
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Why Is Qualcomm Stock Soaring Thursday? - Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM)
Raised Financial Targets Through Fiscal 2029 Qualcomm raised its fiscal 2029 non-handset revenue target to $40 billion, which represents an approximate twofold increase from its prior fiscal 2029 target. The company updated targets for its QCT semiconductor business, projecting automotive
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Qualcomm Stock Jumps as $40 Billion AI Strategy Expands Beyond Smartphones
Qualcomm stock rose more than 12% in premarket trading on Thursday after the chipmaker raised its long-term revenue target outside smartphones. The company now expects its non-handset businesses to generate $40 billion in revenue by fiscal 2029, twice its previous goal. The revised target includes
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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
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Qualcomm Accelerates Push to Be Bigger than Smartphone Chips
Qualcomm is revving up a plan to outgrow its persona as a chipmaker for smartphones and become an all-around technology and artificial intelligence platform. The semiconductor company said Wednesday that it now expects non-handset revenue to hit $40 billion in fiscal 2029, doubling its previous
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Qualcomm unveiled its comprehensive Dragonfly platform for data centers at its investor day, marking a major expansion beyond smartphones. The chipmaker secured Meta and Microsoft as early customers and announced a $3.9 billion acquisition of AI software startup Modular. With the Dragonfly C1000 CPU arriving in 2028, Qualcomm faces intense competition from Nvidia in the AI infrastructure market.
Qualcomm Unveils Comprehensive Data Center Portfolio
Qualcomm used its investor day event in New York this week to announce a sweeping entry into the data center business, unveiling the Qualcomm Dragonfly platform designed to compete in the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure market
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. "We have a comprehensive portfolio to enter the next phase of the data center market," CEO Cristiano Amon declared, positioning the San Diego-based company as a "full-stack player in physical AI, compute, everywhere"1
. The move represents a significant strategic shift for the smartphone chip giant, which now targets a total addressable market exceeding one trillion dollars and aims to capture more than 5% of that market within five to seven years1
.The Qualcomm data center business portfolio includes multiple new processors: the Dragonfly C1000 CPU and the Dragonfly AI300 accelerator, following the already-announced AI200 and AI250 accelerators
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. Tony Pialis, Qualcomm's EVP and GM for data center, outlined an ambitious rollout schedule: connectivity products will reach market this year, followed by the new AI accelerator and custom silicon products in 2027, with the Dragonfly C1000 CPU entering production in the second half of 20282
.Meta and Microsoft Sign On as Early Partners
Qualcomm secured two tech giants as launch partners for its AI data center solutions. Meta committed to deploying the Dragonfly C1000 CPU across its facilities under what Mark Zuckerberg called "a multigenerational collaboration" that "will help put personal superintelligence into billions of people's hands"
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. Microsoft, meanwhile, plans to use Qualcomm's High-Bandwidth Compute-based AI chips3
. "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," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said1
.Pialis revealed that Qualcomm has also won two unnamed hyperscalers as customers for custom silicon, with revenue expected before the end of this calendar year
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. "I have not had to push my way into hyperscale customers; they've been pulling us in," he emphasized1
.High-Bandwidth Compute Targets Memory Bottleneck
The centerpiece of Qualcomm's technical strategy is High-Bandwidth Compute, a proprietary architecture designed to address what Pialis called the "memory bottleneck" plaguing current AI workloads
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. HBC tightly couples memory and processing by integrating an XPU beneath a DRAM stack, rather than separating processors from optimized memory technologies like HBM (high-bandwidth memory) and SRAM (static RAM)2
. The company claims HBC delivers a 200x increase in capacity per watt compared with SRAM and a 6x increase in bandwidth per watt on large workloads compared with HBM1
.Qualcomm says Microsoft will use this new category of AI chips that relies on cheaper memory chips used in smartphones and laptops, instead of the pricey high-bandwidth chips used by Nvidia and SRAM memory used by Cerebras Systems
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. "That is a tremendous value that we deliver to the industry in terms of performance per cost advantage," Pialis stated3
.Dragonfly C1000 CPU Designed for Agentic AI
The Dragonfly C1000 CPU features cores based on Qualcomm's custom Oryon architecture and will operate at more than 5 GHz in a chiplet-based design featuring more than 250 cores
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. Qualcomm claims the processor offers 2x better performance per watt and 30 percent more speed than competitors' processors2
. The chipmaker said the data center CPU was built specifically for agentic AI and focuses on delivering computing performance without excessive power consumption4
.Qualcomm plans to offer multiple C1000 variants targeting agentic AI, general-purpose computing, and AI head-node workloads
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. The company also detailed new connectivity technologies, including QAM16 coherent-lite optical modules that enable cluster-to-cluster optical connectivity up to 20 kilometers2
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Modular Acquisition Challenges Nvidia's CUDA Dominance
Qualcomm announced a $3.9 billion all-stock deal to acquire AI software startup Modular, issuing roughly 19 million shares with the transaction expected to close in the second half of this year
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. The Modular acquisition positions Qualcomm against Nvidia's proprietary CUDA software that has locked in millions of developers3
. Modular makes the Mojo programming language and the MAX inference engine, software that lets AI models run across chips from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm without developers rewriting code for each processor5
.Amon revealed a partnership with AI-software firm Hugging Face, saying this collaboration would enable AI firms to deploy new models on Qualcomm's hardware with "zero manual integration work"
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. Hugging Face Co-Founder and CEO Clément Delangue confirmed: "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"1
.Qualcomm Faces Crowded Competition in AI Infrastructure Market
The shift reflects mounting pressure in the smartphone market, which has been squeezed by a memory chip shortage driven by surging demand for AI infrastructure, and major customers such as Apple and Samsung developing chips in-house
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. Qualcomm is re-entering a fast-growing but hyper-competitive AI infrastructure market full of large incumbents such as Nvidia, the newly minted Cerebras, and other custom chip options including Amazon's Graviton and Google's Axion, Bank of America analysts warned3
.BofA analysts expect modest revenue of roughly $2 billion to $5 billion annually from Qualcomm's data center push by fiscal 2027-2028
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. AI inference—running trained AI models—has emerged as a key battleground where Qualcomm believes its decades of mobile chip design expertise in power efficiency provides an advantage5
. CFO Akash Palkhiwala noted that Qualcomm already has business with nearly every hyperscaler through its smartphone chips and other existing products, making the data center expansion a natural extension rather than starting from scratch4
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