Qualcomm is tailored for on-device artificial intelligence, apple’s iPhone A20 Pro.
The new chip, branded Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Qualcomm said in a press release on Tuesday that it uses a 2-nanometer manufacturing process and will power premium smartphones from companies such as Motorola, Xiaomi and ZTE.
Qualcomm is introducing two versions of the chip, one with additional features and “Extreme” branding.
The announcement comes as the broader smartphone industry is reeling from a global contraction due to soaring memory costs that have pushed up the price of finished devices.
According to Counterpoint Research, the overall smartphone market is expected to contract by 14% in unit shipments in 2026, with the potential for an additional 1% contraction in 2027.
Smartphone companies are responding by focusing on premium-tier devices targeted at consumers with more disposable income.
Qualcomm is positioning its phones, which run on its high-end chips, as “AI hubs” that can process AI models and generate tokens without relying on the cloud. At a launch event earlier this month, Apple positioned its iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub” capable of on-device AI processing.
“We’re moving from a very phone-centric model to an agent-centric model to enable new experiences,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at a launch event Tuesday.
In addition to the central processor (CPU), the new Qualcomm chipset also includes a graphics processing unit (GPU) and a neural processing unit (NPU) that handles AI workloads and can handle agents running in the background. Qualcomm also added security features to control agent access to sensitive data.
At Tuesday’s livestreamed presentation, Amon said: Google Rick Osterloh is the search giant’s head of platforms and devices. He said Google’s Gemini will be able to understand the user’s context (for example, when a person is in a car) thanks to the chip’s processing power and sensors. Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset can run models with 30 billion parameters.
“AI will be asking for more than just commands on the device. It will be completing tasks on behalf of the user, rather than operating an app,” Amon said.
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