Qualcomm confirms it's dipping into datacenter world again, probably for AI

CEO Cristiano Amon teases plans for high-speed-low-power inferencing products

Computex Qualcomm is preparing products for the datacenter.

CEO Cristiano Amon used the last minute of his keynote at the Computex conference in Taiwan to reveal the chipmaker is working on products that he said will be described "soon."

Qualcomm quit the datacenter market in 2018 after a failed effort to build Arm servers.

Amon said when asked why Qualcomm would return: "If we had something unique and disruptive, there is room for Qualcomm. And I think that is exactly the approach we are taking for the datacenter."

"We have some very interesting IP on CPU," he said – a likely reference to its 2021 acquisition of Nuvia – "especially on CPU changed for the age of AI."

"CPU becomes very important and especially how we think about clusters of inference that is about high performance at very low power."

Amon didn't say when Qualcomm will reveal products.

"We're busy," he said. "Hopefully we will do something that will provide a great contribution to the industry."

And with that, he left the stage – leaving behind many questions. For what it's worth, CNBC reports Qualcomm plans a custom CPU that interfaces with Nvidia's GPUs and software.

The bulk of Amon's speech focused on AI PCs. He opened with news that in the year since Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors for PCs debuted, the world's top 200 apps are now available in versions specifically coded for the processor, and users spend 93 percent of their time on native apps. He welcomed the imminent debut of a Snapdragon-native version of hit game Fortnite and noted "On Windows there is no drama with Epic" – a nod to disputes between the game's developer and Apple + Google.

But later in his talk he said "impatient investors" have asked when the AI PC will take off.

His answer was that agentic AI applications will spur uptake by business and consumers alike, and cited examples such as an AI-infused app helping a factory manager understand how to improve efficiency and more quickly produce monthly reports. He also played a video featuring Docker president Mark Cavage praising on-device AI as necessary to help developers produce more agentic apps, and noting the containerization pioneer has ported its development tools to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X PC processors.

For now, Amon feels Qualcomm's ten percent PC market share is already a fine achievement and compared it favorably to the uptake of smartphones.

Amon also talked up multi-device agentic experiences, saying AI will enable a user to ensure all their devices are aware of their "contexts" so they can move work between smart glasses, smartphones, and AI PCs – and always use the best device for the job.

The CEO also teased a new generation of PC processors which he said Qualcomm will disclose in September, and promised they will deliver significant performance gains compared to the current Snapdragon X range. ®