Welcome back. Qualcomm unveiling a new data center road map including the introduction of the Dragonfly C1000 central processing unit. Revealing that Meta agreed to use the new chip as part of a new partnership. Qualcomm set to acquire AI startup Modular. Joining me is the President and CEO of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon. Cristiano, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Happy to be talking to you, Maria.
You are diversifying the company in a big way and putting it on a different growth track. Tell me about these recent deals and this entrance into this new market for Qualcomm.
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.
Very exciting. After the investor day, a lot of analysts were questioning how sustainable this is because we know, Cristiano, your company dominated mobile chips and now you're becoming a competitor in this very crowded field. How much confidence do you have that you're going to be a serious competitor to a company like Nvidia, for example?
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.
You raised your fiscal revenue target up to $40 billion, two times higher than the prior goal. So I want to get your take on that. Break it down for us, Cristiano. How much of the future growth comes from smartphones versus what you're talking about: automotive, PCs, AI servers, robotics and other industrial applications?
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%.
And you know, all of this incredible demand that is leading to this buildout of data centers has some people worried about the fact that the spending seems to be dominated or driven by just seven companies, right? You've got companies like Microsoft and Google and Meta and Nvidia and Anthropic, et cetera. Do you worry that this is a small universe of no doubt hyperscalers, but talk to us about the expectations that you have that this massive spending continues. What are we at, like $800 billion in spending this year alone?
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.
It's interesting because you mentioned the smart glasses and we spoke with the leadership team at Meta about those smart glasses, and I just wonder if there's a lot of compute near a person's brain with those smart glasses. I agree, those smart glasses are really cool looking and they're interesting to be able to get such intelligence so quickly, but is there any worry that there's so much compute power on your face?
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.
It's really incredible, Cristiano. I mean, I feel like we really are in a new world with regard to humans interacting with machines. I want to get back to the agentic AI part of the conversation. Cristiano, we did a lot of work on AI and the future and this intelligence revolution, and we did have some skeptics come on the show and talk to us about how agentic AI is equivalent to agents in some cases acting unpredictably. Cristiano, what do you want to say about that? We know that Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, had an emergency meeting with a number of the AI companies and banks, trying to ensure that institutions have the right patches in place to get ahead of potential bad actors when it comes to agentic AI. Do you have worries about agentic AI and the agents acting unpredictably, Cristiano?
