Akash Palkhiwala, CFO and COO of Qualcomm (QCOM), talks about how the company's AI data center pivot serves as a key inflection point. Qualcomm named Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) as early customers in the AI infrastructure buildout. Akash believes the company is primed to take significant market share in what he calls a "trillion-dollar market." He adds how Qualcomm's deeper push into the AI buildout affects its legacy businesses like devices and automotive.
======== Schwab Network ========
Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.
Subscribe to the Market Minute...
What Akash Palkhiwala said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm's CFO and COO, discussed the company's expansion into data centers, revising its 2029 non-handset revenue target from $22 billion to $40 billion, with $15 billion expected from data centers and $5 billion next year. He highlighted the Dragonfly brand for data center products, including custom chips, a CPU claimed to be two times faster than current offerings, and an AI accelerator using high-bandwidth compute. Palkhiwala noted early custom chip engagements with two global hyperscalers starting in 2027, and mentioned Meta and Microsoft as existing customers. He also discussed physical AI, predicting Qualcomm will be the largest automotive silicon supplier next year, and robotics as a potential trillion-dollar market. He addressed the MOLINAR acquisition, an open-source AI software stack, and emphasized Qualcomm's supply chain scale, shipping 40 billion components annually.
Key takeaways
Qualcomm raised its 2029 non-handset revenue target from $22 billion to $40 billion, nearly doubling it.
Data center revenue is projected at $15 billion in 2029 and $5 billion next year.
Custom chip engagements with two global hyperscalers begin in 2027.
Dragonfly is the new brand for all data center products, including a CPU claimed to be two times faster than current market offerings.
Qualcomm expects to be the largest automotive silicon supplier next year.
Welcome back to Opening Bell. We want to get you ready for the trading day. We have a big, very special guest with us right now: Akash Palkhiwala. Thank you so much for being with us, Akash. You're the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Qualcomm. We're so glad you're with us. So, you had your investor day, and people are really cheering. Qualcomm's transformation and the AI build-out is real. Tell us a little bit about what's on the agenda here.
Yeah, Nicole, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. I'm very excited about what we announced yesterday. I think Qualcomm has been the leader on edge devices with smartphones, cars, industrial, and other areas. Now we're bringing those technologies to data centers. As data centers evolve, what becomes very important is being able to do processing in data centers at very low power. That's something we've been doing for a long time in edge devices, and we're bringing that advantage to the data center. So, very positive reception from customers. I think the hyperscalers are looking for alternatives, and as we move from training to inference, and as data center processing changes from using GPUs for everything to disaggregated computing, there's a lot more room for other players to come in and give solutions optimized for low-power workloads. So, very excited about what we announced yesterday. I think it's just the beginning for Qualcomm and data centers.
Yeah, you've been quietly calibrating your CPUs for this, and now with data centers, it's somewhat monumental to folks because we're going to talk about non-handset revenue there. So, really big projections going forward. You know, on the numbers overall, the CEO also noting how confident you are in the forecast. I mean, by 2029, we talk about $40 billion. Tell me a little bit about some of the forecasts on that, and so much of it, $15 billion from the data center business alone that you're speaking of.
Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I think we had a target of 2029 revenue for non-handset of $22 billion. We are revising that target from $22 billion to $40 billion, so that's nearly a two-X increase in a revenue target two years out. And so, very excited. Data center is a big part of it. We are now looking at $15 billion of revenue in 2029, and $5 billion of revenue next year. And really, this is a very large market. It's a $1 trillion market. And for Qualcomm to have a target of, say, approximately 5% share of that market is very reasonable. And so, I think it's just the beginning. We start in 2027 with custom chip engagements with two global hyperscalers, but that's the start. And we're going to engage with other hyperscalers and have a very broad product line. So, super excited about what we're going to do with it.
I mean, there's been speculation about some of the other names. We know Meta and Microsoft are some early customers. Tell us about those relationships and what the expectations are and the agenda for you to provide to them.
Yeah, we've been working with these customers for a very long period of time, right? Meta, as an example, their Ray-Ban Meta glasses use a Qualcomm chip in them. Microsoft Surface PCs use a Qualcomm chip in them. You think about Google and Amazon; they all use our chips on the edge devices. So, these are companies that we're very familiar with. We've been discussing how our technology can become relevant to their data center needs. And this is a lot of things coming together, right? We've been working on it for a while, and now you're seeing their needs align with what Qualcomm can deliver. And hence, the big change.
And Dragonfly, the brand name now that you're using to differentiate from your edge-centric Snapdragon, tell me a little bit about that and where it plays a role.
Yeah, Dragonfly is really the global brand for everything data center, right? So we're doing custom chips for customers. We are building really the fastest CPU; we think it's going to be two-X better than anything that's on the market today. We are also building an AI accelerator with this unique technology called HBM, high-bandwidth compute, that's going to deliver very high bandwidth at very low power. And then we're also building connectivity chips. And all of these four families of products will be under the Dragonfly name.
9 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Palkhiwala, A. (2026, June 25). Qualcomm (QCOM) CFO & COO on AI Data Center Push, META & MSFT New Customers [Interview transcript]. Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1039293/
MLA
Akash Palkhiwala. "Qualcomm (QCOM) CFO & COO on AI Data Center Push, META & MSFT New Customers." Schwab Network, 25 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1039293/.
BibTeX
@misc{palkhiwala2026_1039293,
author = {Akash Palkhiwala},
title = {Qualcomm (QCOM) CFO \& COO on AI Data Center Push, META \& MSFT New Customers},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1039293/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
