Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon speaks before Siemens’ keynote address at the annual consumer electronics trade show CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA on January 6, 2026.
Steve Marcus | Reuters
Qualcomm On Wednesday, it unveiled a data center central processing unit called the Dragonfly C1000, saying: Meta We plan to use it when we start production in 2028.
The chipmaker says its new data center CPUs are built for agent AI and are focused on delivering computing performance without consuming much power.
The announcement, made during Qualcomm’s investor presentation, is another sign that the chipmaker best known for smartphone processors and modems is aggressively targeting the data center market.
Qualcomm announced Wednesday that it has a roadmap to target rapidly growing markets with several different products, including AI chips and products that combine multiple chips.
“We’ve been executing, we’ve been collecting assets, and at this point we feel like we have a comprehensive portfolio to go into the next phase of data centers,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at an investor day.
The company’s stock fell in Wednesday trading.
Qualcomm Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkiwala said in an interview that Qualcomm already has deals with almost all hyperscalers through smartphone chips and other existing products.
“This is not a new relationship. The benefits of what we already offer them at the edge, combined with our scale, expertise and trust in Qualcomm, make them engage with us for their data center,” Palkiwala said.
This is also due to increased investor interest in CPUs, as experts believe that central processors will take more of the workload from graphics processing units and AI chips thanks to autonomously running AI agents.
Palkiwala said the CPU market is “really in short supply and we need multiple players.”
Qualcomm’s main business in recent years has been smartphones, which accounted for two-thirds of the company’s product revenue in the quarter that ended in March.
But the company is looking to diversify into cars, robots and now data centers, a chip market that estimates say is growing faster than the smartphone sector, where shipments peaked in 2017.
The company says its expertise in making smartphone and PC chips that conserve battery life will help customers such as hyperscalers, which are increasingly building data centers where power is the limiting factor.
The company announced it has won two contracts to manufacture custom silicon chips for hyperscalers.
Separately, Qualcomm announced it has acquired Modular for an undisclosed price. The startup develops software that allows AI applications to run on a wide range of chip architectures, which Qualcomm says is comparable to Nvidia’s CUDA, which is used in many AI applications.
Amon told investors it’s not too late for the company to enter the data center market.
“When people ask if it’s too late to get into data centers, they should think about scale and execution, engineering capabilities, or operations and supply chain,” Amon said.
