We all got to test out Meta Ray-Ban displays. A question popped up in my head. When does this get commoditized and what role does Qualcomm play in the entire?
When the internet first started, mobile internet developed faster in markets that were not traditionally internet markets. And I think we're going to see the same thing with those new classes of devices of AI.
One of the most influential figures in global tech and the semiconductor industry, Cristiano Amon, is the president and CEO of Qualcomm, the company secretly powering the entire world. From his early days as an engineer in Brazil to leading one of the most critical tech firms on the planet, Cristiano has been at the center of every major shift in mobile and wireless technology. Under his leadership, Qualcomm has gone beyond just smartphone chips, pushing innovation in AI, automotive, XR, and the future of connected devices.
Every time I go to India, people riding their motorcycles and they get their phone and they put it between the helmet. That tells you that why aren't I using your smart glass?
What's the top challenge for you right now? What's a call you've taken recently in the last 6 months or the last year that you got it wrong? Ladies and gentlemen, I am with the CEO of Qualcomm and I loved your keynote.
Thank you very much. And I'm also really glad you took the time to look at our trailer. I want to know, as you know we do a bunch of things but from the game dev side, the accelerators have constantly kept getting better. You are sort of gunning for a serious laptop, a serious computing device that everybody can have. What's the vision there so far? How have sales been? How has response been?
We're incredibly happy because we entered this market. It was already an established market because we thought we could do something unique and we always believe in the mobile PC convergence and we believe we could do something that will change a little bit your PC experience and we're delivering on that. I think if you look at some of those devices with X Elite, they're very fast. They look very cool. The form factor small and then tons of battery life, multiple days of battery life where people didn't expect to have that on a PC. But the other part is we knew that this was going to change. I think if you hear what Google is saying, if you look what Sundar is saying about the agentic experience coming to PCs, that's the disruption. That's the entry point. And I think that's a great opportunity for us. Having said that, we just started. We launched in the first retail of the United States in the top five European markets. We're expanding to other markets right now including India. And we expect that we're going to go to enterprise commercial next. So right now we're tracking about 9% share for somebody that started from zero. I think we're very happy. We look at other players in the PC. Took them seven years to get to about that market share. So it's going great. What you're going to see here is we're investing on it. We have new chips. We want to be disruptive. We want to again change the performance. And one of the things you will see probably as we announce new products is at Snapdragon Summit and how much gaming is going to improve. And I want to talk a little bit about gaming because we need to be thinking about gaming a little different. By the way, super excited about the gaming you showed me. I can't wait to see it running on Snapdragon X Elite. But gaming is an area that I am incredibly excited about AI because we have all this gaming experience. We talk about building great graphics and that's what we're doing. One of the biggest improvements you see from one generation to the other will be graphics. But AI also changes the game. You have AI for non-player characters. You have AI for you to interact with the game. And every interaction is going to be different. And I think we're going to even see AIs changing the gameplay as you move into the game. So exciting time for gaming.
Yeah. So I have a question, right? I tried the 1X Sugar product. Have you tried this console that uses the Snapdragon inside it? It's from China. It's this handheld gaming device. I have a technical question for you, right? And I'm asking you to predict the future here, which is you saw the game that I showed you. That's a PC console game, right? Do you have a timeline in mind for that to eventually be able to be played on a mobile phone?
That is a great question. This is a great question. And I think when you think about the future of gaming and I want to answer your question from different angles. Okay. First I am going to talk a little bit about console games. You know I know we talk about PCs and phones but I want to talk console games. So we have a product that we did with Sony. It is incredibly successful. When we launched it I think it was sold out which is the PlayStation Portal. And the PlayStation Portal is a Snapdragon chipset on a PlayStation that you extend the gameplay from the console to the portal. And the user experience at the time was I'm starting playing the game on the console. I want to go play in my room. I want to go play sitting on the sofa in my bed. I'm going to continue playing everywhere. And I think we're about to see this happening now, which is the whole experience of gaming, especially Triple A games. They're going to be developed in a way that you're going to start playing on your PC, on your console, and then you finish on your phone and then you go back to your PC. And there's so many titles thinking about this. We're seeing the full convergence of mobile and PC. We see AI enabling major games with things like super resolution as an example. And then you're going to have the whole gaming experience changing into a different experience now enabled by AI. So I expect that we're going to see more and more especially as you saw in the conversation with the keynote with Google as they also go into the personal computing devices, you're going to see the entire Android mobile ecosystem now running on PCs and laptops. That's going to be on Windows, that's going to be on Android. I think Microsoft is enabling that as well. We're also going to see the PC ecosystem running on mobile devices and the whole merging.
Yes, the whole interaction with gaming will be different and the convergence of mobile and PC is inevitable. So you think there'll be one platform mobile?
There will be multiple platforms, but I think games are going to be designed for you to play on multiple devices. As I talked in the keynote, I think we're going to a future that is not going to be about one device. It's going to be multiple devices working together. And I think that's going to be true for the use cases. And gaming is going to be one of the use cases.
Interesting. I want to shift slightly, right? Last week I was with a bunch of creators and Mark Zuckerberg. We all got to test out the Meta Ray-Ban displays.
We're super proud of that product with them.
It is phenomenal, right? Especially the glasses, the waveguides, the EMGs. It's a piece of the future, right? So, thank you so much for being a part of the future in that way. Which is now the present. So, I shouldn't even be calling it the future. But the minute I used it, a question popped up in my head which is how much of a lead time does Meta have on all the other companies? How long do you think it will take for 10 different companies to do this? When does this get commoditized, this new technology, and what role does Qualcomm play in the entire?
Okay, there's a lot of questions in there.
So why don't we break that down and I'm going to talk about the first component.
Yeah, about companies' lead on new technology.
If I go back in history, there's a lot we can learn from the history of technology transition. And I think even within Qualcomm, we learned a lot. We have been fortunate enough that we have always reinvented ourselves. So we didn't miss any technology transition. For example, in the mobile industry, many companies missed technology transitions. You look at Blackberry, you look at Nokia as an example, right? So I think what happened is when new platforms arrive, usually the company that has no legacy is very quick to embrace the new technology and innovate it. For example, what I like about what Meta is doing, they saw early on that you're going to have devices that you can wear like glasses because of the simple concept which started as a conversation about the metaverse which is can I merge the physical and the digital world. Can I superimpose? Is that going to be important for the future social for example and the future how people communicate with each other and call and messages like you can think about WhatsApp as an example but then also about this agent that you see the device and there's no legacy, there's nothing to worry about. You can start with the new. And I think that's where we see the excitement and the focus of Meta how they started with glasses and the Ray-Ban Meta is an overwhelming success. I think it exceeded everybody's expectations and I think it shows what's possible. For companies to continue to be in the lead you have to keep going. You have to keep pushing the use cases, the experience. And I think you start to see now it's about adding the display and information on the display. Every technology, if you just develop something good and you stop, there are a lot of companies doing that right now. If you just think you're going to monetize your success for a long time, that's very risky. So I think I am incredibly motivated about how our partners keep adding and inventing new capabilities. It's always a race. Success today does not mean success tomorrow unless you keep reinventing and building new products. And I think that's what's happening. And the last part of your answer is I think that technology is going to get democratized. It's interesting. I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to give you an India example. Every time I go to India, we're very proud of our teams there. We have over 10,000 people across multiple sites. And I always notice one thing. People riding their motorcycles and they get their phone and they put it between the helmet right here. They stuck it right here. That tells you that why not using our smart glass? Incredible potential for navigation, for everything. So you can see as the technology becomes available the potential is huge. So I think this technology is going to come from different companies at different capabilities from different markets. It's going to be tailored to every market. It's very personal. It's very regional. And I think the role of Qualcomm is to build a platform that is open and work with everybody. So actually we can bring that technology and innovation. I'm incredibly excited about those new devices and I'm going to use one last comment. I know I'm giving a long answer, but this is important. When the internet first started, it was interesting to see that the mobile internet developed faster and more complete in markets that were not traditionally internet markets. So the mobile internet developed faster in Brazil, in India, in China because people started experiencing the internet on a mobile device. And I think we're going to see the same thing with those new classes of devices of AI.
You think it's going to be slower adoption from America?
I don't think it's going to be slower adoption, but I think we're going to see the mobile internet reshape the internet. And now the mobile internet is bigger than how the internet started with PCs. It's going to be like that with those new devices and now actually the opposite. I think the speed of adoption of those technologies globally is going to be much faster.
