'IT'S A VERY AMBITIOUS MOVE': Qualcomm bets BIG on AI

Happy to be talking to you, Maria.

Absolutely. Maybe I'll step back a little bit. Actually, we had this investor day yesterday and that coincides with my five year anniversary as CEO of the company that I joined 30 years ago. We have executed the first phase of the diversification of Qualcomm when we went from a mobile processor company to providing semiconductors to everything on the edge, from automotive to broadband and PCs, and we entered the data center. We announced a complete portfolio of technologies that will be where the data center is going. Agentic AI, CPU and accelerator with a new memory architecture. Memory is very hot these days and we don't require HBM, and we talk about connectivity and custom ASIC, and Qualcomm will be a player in the data center. And we're excited about that. With the acquisition of Modular, we throw our name in the thought to be a full stack player with a software stack for the data center as well.

You know, Maria, it's great. I was reading a lot of the analyst reports from investor day and that's one headline that really caught my attention. There's a headline that said, 'This is not your father's Qualcomm anymore.' And I think that's kind of the story of the company. The company has been, and we don't apologize for it, it's still an important business of Qualcomm. I think mobile is important. We're working now on 6G. I think we're actually the only company in the United States that is driving the 6G road map. We're going to be the top semiconductor provider in automotive globally. We went into this hot transformation of industries for the future of industrial manufacturing. We went into robotics and it was natural we would expand into data center. What makes Qualcomm so unique, our track record of execution proved that we can enter new markets and develop a new core competence, and we have a very vast technology roadmap. Even though there are many companies bigger than Qualcomm, in 2025 we were the number one company in America in patent applications, and no challenge is too big for Qualcomm.

Yes. This is a great question. We have been on this mission to diversify the company and have more vectors of growth and revenue than handsets. So what we did back in 2024, we did indicate that our non-handset revenues will be $22 billion. We upgraded that number to $40 billion. That means by fiscal '29, handsets will represent about one-third of the company's revenue, from being before in excess of 70%.

We're now entering a new phase of AI, and the new phase of AI, every computing system including the computers we use every day, our phone, our PC, new classes of devices like smart glasses, they're going to be running artificial intelligence, they're going to be doing inference in those devices. So we're entering the phase that intelligence is becoming distributed and hybrid, which is a good thing for us because all of the other businesses that we have are going to get upgraded with AI. That means that AI is not only concentrated on the data center and it's going to everywhere, so a lot of opportunities will exist for more demand for computing. The second part of the answer is the demand for data centers is incredible, and as AI moves from transactional to agentic, now we have agents that go do things that operate the computers on our behalf. The demand for tokens is now astronomical and that is driving massive amount of demand in the data center, and that's why you see this kind of spending. There's a lot of questions about is this sustainable or not sustainable. It's hard to answer with precision, but I can tell you about the bigger picture. Back in 2000, and this is not a great year to provide an example, but back in 2000, the reality is whatever people thought the internet is going to be is much bigger right now. In 2026, it's way bigger than people even dreamed the internet would be back in the year 2000. I think AI is the same thing. Whatever people believe AI is going to be, it's going to be bigger. Now, we're in the early innings. I think everybody is investing, everybody wants to be a winner, and we'll see how these things play out, but at least for the next few years, I think demand is massive and that will create opportunities for new entrants like Qualcomm.

No, not really. Look, I think those are not very different than the compute you have on your smartphone. But the interesting thing about glasses, though, there's a very interesting thing about glasses. Meta is correct. There's many other companies investing on this. This, as we humans start to interact with computers the way we interact with ourselves, glasses is a very important real estate, close to our eyes, ears, mouth. AI is going to see what we see, hear what we hear, read what we read, and you have this intelligence very quickly, so those things are likely going to be a new class of mobile devices. We see designs from all major AI companies in the world, and actually it's a foundation thing for 6G. 6G is going to transform all of us into walking cameras because we have the ability to everything that we see, send it to AI models that interact with us and get intelligence right away, and that's an exciting new device category.

Look, we're at the early stages of agents and there's different types of agents. For example, what we see in phones and PCs right now, you saw Microsoft at the Build conference talking about unmetered intelligence with models that can run on your PC and your phone, and what those things are going to do, it's going to operate the device for you. You're going to tell the agent, 'I want to get this thing done,' and it will go to the internet, go to your device, operate your app for you, and those things will start getting traction. It's true, like every technology, it's the same issue since we started to go digital. That's why cyber security becomes very important. With every technology, you need to make sure you have the right safeguards, and more importantly, you have trusted companies, trusted providers and technologies that are going to work with all the institutions to make sure that you actually have the safeguards in place. It's no different than the entire financial system becoming digital, and I think this is the next big step function. Those are very powerful models that can do many things, and it will require a lot of trusted companies to be involved in the loop.

It's a combination. I think we do have ambition to scale in the data center, and I think our early wins are very encouraging. I think we provide, we're starting from nothing. We did provide a very high confidence forecast of $5 billion in fiscal '27 that quickly grows to close to $15 billion, and that's in addition. We have the other vectors of growth which is our robotics business, our automotive business, our new industrial business, and when you look at all of those things combined, you see a path for Qualcomm to more than double our revenues, and that's why we provide this $100 billion revenue forecast in five to seven years. One other element that is built into that is robotics. There's a lot of opportunities for robotics. The technology is still under development, but it's very promising what we see in this field.

It's a very ambitious move. I think we're aiming very high. And it almost doesn't matter because it's an incredible software team. They worked at Apple, they worked at Tesla and some of the biggest companies, and Google, some of the biggest companies in the world. And what we're doing, actually we're providing a platform for AI computing that is scaled from the data center to the edge, and we make it available to everyone. That's the plan of Modular. They do today and they've been making this technology available. This enables Qualcomm to be a full stack provider, at the same time offering an alternative to the industry that is more affordable and allows AI to scale and go into every possible device that exists out there.

The Qualcomm execution track record is actually very good. Every new industry that we said we will enter, in a period of time we became the leader of the industry. So if anything, we have our track record, engineering culture, innovation, and the fact that we're primarily an engineering company and ability to be focused and execute. The other part of the answer is, we're competing. We're enabling all of these companies. The way we're approaching software is the same.

Oh, yeah. It's significant. We just had 23, I want to repeat, 23 quarters of sequential growth in automotive. The last quarter we provided a guide for about 50% year over year growth in automotive, and our automotive business is already exiting the year at a $6 billion run rate, and we did provide a projection for that to get to about $10 billion in fiscal '29. But what's important now about our automotive business is when you think about who our customers are right now, every automaker now across all the major markets that have automakers in Europe and Japan and Korea, the United States, India, in China, are using Qualcomm platforms. We're a big supplier of the industry. And our design win pipeline, which means all of the contracted backlog of business that was $45 billion, we updated that yesterday and the pipeline is now $65 billion of contracted business.

Look, exactly as I outlined. I think Qualcomm, first we started back in 2021, we put a strategy that we're going to build semiconductors for everything in the edge, everything outside the data center. We have done that. That is now scaling revenue. We proved that we can learn new core competences. Qualcomm will be a player in the next generation AI data center, and we'll be an AI platform company from sub-2 milliwatts from wearable earbuds all the way to a data center, and there's very few companies in the world with that breadth of technology and IP, and that creates a very exciting story for our investors on the long run.

Thank you, Maria. Great to talk to you.