About Cristiano Amon
Cristiano Amon has been promoting Qualcomm's expansion beyond mobile chips into data centers, automotive, and other sectors, with a focus on agentic AI. In June 2026, at Computex in Taipei, he described 2026 as "the year of agents" and argued that AI agents will shift the center of a user's digital experience from the smartphone to the agent itself, which will operate across multiple devices. He introduced Dragonfly as a new brand for Qualcomm's data center products and projected $5 billion in data center revenue for fiscal 2027, rising to $15 billion by fiscal 2029, citing customer engagements and the acquisition of Alphawave. Amon also announced a partnership with Meta to use Qualcomm's new CPU and the acquisition of AI startup Modular, which he said could create an "Android type moment" in the industry by offering an open software stack.
Amon has stated that the demand for AI tokens is "astronomical" and that the existing computing infrastructure needs a major upgrade. He has emphasized that Qualcomm's technology is differentiated by power efficiency, a design philosophy rooted in battery-powered devices, and a new accelerator that does not require expensive HBM memory. In a conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build 2026, Amon discussed how agentic AI is changing device architecture and called for an open, horizontal platform to enable agents to work across different devices. He has also said that smart glasses could become as large a market as smartphones, with Qualcomm already shipping "multiple tens of millions" per year.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Cristiano Amon's recent appearances.
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Transcript (17 segments)
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Host0:05
Welcome back. Qualcomm shares under a bit of pressure today. The company holding its investor day here in New York City. Kristina Partsinevelos is there with that company's CEO. Christina, take it away.
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Kristina Partsinevelos0:17
Thank you, Scott. I'm with Cristiano Amon. Thank you so much for joining us. What I found interesting was, you know, in the past, we always think of Qualcomm as this smartphone chip company. And you started the presentation with saying that you were going to be a full stack solution. And some of that, I guess, process seems to be through acquisitions. And you announced Modular this morning. Is that really just a software solution or I guess, answer to NVIDIA's CUDA moat?
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Cristiano Amon0:39
Look, I think maybe I'll step back, Cristina. I thank you for coming here to investor day. I'm very happy to talk to you.
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Kristina Partsinevelos0:45
In person.
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Cristiano Amon0:46
In New York. Yes, absolutely. But if I step back, you know, we have been diversifying the company, going to new industries. And in those new industries, we're actually building a combination of silicon and software. And there have been a lot of acquisitions done through the years. Remind you that, you know, as we talk about going into industrial, we bought companies like Edge and Post, we bought Arduino, which is one of the largest hardware developer communities with 33 million developers. And then as you would imagine, as we go to data center, we have to build a full stack solution. And I think the acquisition of Modular, plus the ability for us to continue to scale our software, is actually fundamental. If I talk about a new chapter of Qualcomm, that's what I talk about. It's really a full stack solution for all of this new business. We've been building on the edge and automotive. We had an autonomous and self-driving stack. And of course, we're going to do the same in the data center. And I actually think the industry wants an alternative that is open. It's available to everyone. It's available to all different hardware providers. And that's what Modular is.
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Kristina Partsinevelos1:48
And a total cost of ownership being lower, I guess, in the end.
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Cristiano Amon1:52
At the end, the next generation of data center is really about doing inference at scale and lower TCO. Everybody knows that it's going to have to compete. You have a lot of compute capacity. There's a wall of compute requirements, not enough power. So I think that's where we come to the picture. And an ability to actually offer a software stack that is not only competitive but available to anyone. You know, some people will understand what I'm saying right now, some others won't. But I actually think we may have an Android type moment in the industry right now. And I think that's what we're trying to do with Modular.
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Kristina Partsinevelos2:25
Because think about it. Whenever I text any of your colleagues, I know it's an Android, but to that point, then you make two big announcements today in terms of customers. The fact that for your CPU business, Meta being a customer, and then Microsoft with the high bandwidth compute. If I were to just focus on Meta for a moment, it seems like that revenue is only going to come in in fiscal 2028, which perhaps maybe to some of the analysts in the other room right now, might be a little bit further than expected. What do you say to that?
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Cristiano Amon2:50
Look, if I go back to all the things we have been talking about, remember, we build a comprehensive solution for the data center that's represented today. It has CPU, it has this new HPC, high bandwidth compute. That's a completely different approach to memory. It doesn't require HBM. It has an accelerator. It has connectivity. It has custom ASIC. The first agreement that we had was Meta. And if you remember, we talked about it. We expect data center revenue to start in fiscal 28. But then we got new agreement as we think about our accelerator. And if you remember, we said revenue now has been put into fiscal 27. And then we got a new customer on the compute side, and we said, now we have revenue in fiscal 26. So I think we keep updating. I think we're moving our revenue forecast just because we're starting to gain scale.
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Kristina Partsinevelos3:37
But you keep, I guess, giving us these teasers. And yet there's just rumors. Is it ByteDance? Is it Amazon?
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Cristiano Amon3:42
Here's what I can tell you right now. Today we're talking about four engagements, right? We have the Meta engagement, the CPU. We're very excited about the engagement with Microsoft on high bandwidth compute. And then we have, I'll give you a little bit more. We have two major hyperscalers as customers, one in the United States, one in China.
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Kristina Partsinevelos4:05
So ByteDance's?
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Cristiano Amon4:05
Amazon? I said one in the United States, one in China. That's what I can say right now.
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Kristina Partsinevelos4:10
Okay, so which one is going to be a huge contributor to revenue? Is it the ASICs business or is it the CPU business? In the near term.
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Cristiano Amon4:17
We're going to provide a breakdown right after market close. So I'll be patient in our CFO presentation.
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Kristina Partsinevelos4:22
Now that you're a full stack solution, is it all about, you know, your competitors offer price, pricing, bundling, and they push that even because they say that inferencing will be cheaper in that way. Is that going to be the strategy for Qualcomm going forward? You got to buy the whole stack.
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Cristiano Amon4:35
No. I think we have been probably approaching this market with the absolute maximum flexibility. We will look into our IP and customize it for their people with their IP. We'll be doing just design of different ASICs from the industry. We'll provide for all of our solutions from chiplets to integrated to full merchant SOC.
