Qualcomm bets on custom AI chips, targets Nvidia-led data centre market
Qualcomm isn’t trying to out-Nvidia Nvidia. It’s betting the data-centre AI market will fragment around custom chips that hyperscalers are already demanding.
Qualcomm is entering the data-centre AI fray not by matching Nvidia’s dominance but by preparing three distinct product lines it believes will carve out space in a market that has already moved past monopoly.
Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, told ET the company has built technologies with “extreme relevance” for data centres and is waiting for the right moment to deploy something “completely unique.” The San Diego firm sees room because hyperscalers and labs like Amazon, Anthropic and Google are shifting toward in-house custom silicon for training and inference.
The three fronts are clear: a CPU aimed at agentic AI workloads, an AI accelerator that directly challenges Nvidia’s leadership, and custom chips for hyperscalers scheduled to begin shipping by the end of this calendar year. Palkhiwala emphasised that the accelerator market is moving away from one-size-fits-all solutions toward workload-specific optimisation.
“We are building something that is totally unique and a new architecture versus what the industry has,” he said. Qualcomm’s broader portfolio, long rooted in smartphones, now extends into AI wearables, automotive, telecom infrastructure and laptops, but the data-centre push represents its most direct assault on the high-margin AI infrastructure boom.
While Nvidia still leads, the competitive landscape has fragmented. Palkhiwala noted the data-centre market is “so big that there is room for multiple players,” and Qualcomm intends to differentiate rather than imitate. The company’s partnerships with Google, Meta and OpenAI on the personal-AI side, including smart glasses and agentic devices, further illustrate its bet that silicon tailored to specific use cases will win share.
The bigger test is timing and execution. Qualcomm expects its June quarter to mark the revenue bottom before growth resumes amid memory-chip constraints, yet its India manufacturing ties with Tata, Dixon Technologies and government initiatives suggest a diversified supply-chain strategy that could support long-term ambition. The question now is whether its “totally unique” architecture arrives soon enough to matter in a market already racing ahead.
Original reporting: The Times of India.
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