Welcome to the Age of Intelligence. I'm joined here in Austin, Texas. We are here at Embedded World North America. I'm joined today with Nakul Duggal. Nakul, tell us about your role and the area of responsibility, because you actually have quite a bit of an expanded role now.
I do, I do. Thank you, thank you for having me. It's very nice to meet you. So I run the automotive, the industrial and embedded IoT, and the cloud business at Qualcomm. So three different businesses that have a lot that is similar, but a lot that is also very different. So super exciting time.
So today we're going to talk a little bit about how IoT and AI are joining forces. They're coming together and there's a lot of change that's happening as a result of that. So as we enter into this new era of AI and industrial automation, how is Qualcomm working towards supporting the industrialized verticals and helping solve real-world problems?
So it's a big question and I think it's a question that is really a fantastic opportunity for a company that has the DNA that Qualcomm does. You know, we've built a lot of expertise, we've built a lot of scale as a company in being highly differentiated at being able to solve problems that live at the edge. Now if you think about what is happening in the world of industrial applications, as you think about AI, we connected devices, we connected endpoints to each other, to the internet a long time ago. So that problem was solved. The problem that is new is how do you bring intelligence all the way to the endpoint at a cost point that is highly affordable, that makes things very democratic. And how do you make the workflow ready for AI? How do you make the cloud, how do you make the CIO's job easier to where the CIO can now see what is going on all the way at the edge and be able to take action? That is what the focus of my new business is about. It's about being able to solve problem statements in a very democratic, very horizontal manner across many different industries, look for patterns that are similar, and then be able to work with ecosystem partners, customers to be able to go solve this problem. That's what we've been talking about.
So essentially providing value to a range of industrial applications. So the value proposition is there and Qualcomm is here to kind of enable that today. So I want to talk a little bit about the role of convergence and essentially AI and IoT kind of playing together and how they are impacting the future of industrialization as well as business continuity.
So you know, I think I like to break the problem statement down into two parts. The first one is machine-to-machine applications, right? If you have a sensor that is looking at the performance of an expensive piece of equipment where it's very important to make sure that uptime is something that you know about, and you can make the sensor intelligent to where it is able to provide you trends, it's able to provide you an early warning, how do you now change your workflow to be able to make that part and parcel of the way that you manage your business? That is a very good example of how AI is converging with something that previously was deployed but required human inspection. Other very interesting use case is safety. In a lot of industrial applications, safety of the human is very important. You're dealing with equipment that can fail, you're dealing with equipment where you need to be careful in terms of how you are present, how you are operating that equipment. You're training a new workforce, how do you know if the workforce did actually get trained? That requires you to be able to have a tremendous amount of intelligence at the edge such that you are defining safety boundaries for the plant to be successful, the plant to be safe, insurance costs to be managed. So all of these use cases are very similar in nature because when I think about being able to find convergence between what we do on a day-to-day basis in the products that we build and how those products apply to use cases that require safety to be central, that I think is the definition of how industrials evolve.
It's interesting because I'm hearing a lot more about safety. So when we think about factories and manufacturing facilities and even just any industrial plants, you know, you have OSHA, you have workers. So it's a great way to kind of put that into perspective. So Qualcomm supports, you know, the ecosystem around the intelligent edge. I want to learn a little bit more about, you know, your perspective there and maybe share more about what this means, where Qualcomm's playing in the stack and enabling industrial applications.
You know, we are an ecosystem company. And what I mean by that, when I say ecosystem, because we touch so many technologies. We touch wireless, we touch 5G, we touch Wi-Fi, right? We touch AI, we touch the phone ecosystem, the auto ecosystem. By nature, we end up becoming this magnet for many different parts of the ecosystem converging to where they want to understand what technology are we building, what products they go into, what problems we solve, and how does that help with the innovation, with the differentiation, with the evolution of our ecosystem partners. So what we take pride in is let's go solve problem statements at the foundational level. Once you can go do that, the solutions have very broad applicability, right? And our ecosystem partners, our customers see that and realize the importance of creating those solutions within their own world and extending it to their end vertical. And so this kind of virtual cycle of being able to go look at these things from many different vantage points, I feel makes us extremely valuable.
So this is an exciting week at Embedded World. There's some really big announcements happening today and so we'll see some press releases that go out. So be sure to look at those. So first, we'll talk a little bit about what you guys are announcing at Embedded World North America. So let's talk about two of them. So first, let's start with the new industrial-grade chips or the system-on-chips and maybe talk a little bit about that and maybe you can walk us through these three new SoCs.
Yes, so you know, this is the event where we are talking about industrial intelligence. So we are very happy to share a new family of IQ series processors, industrial by design. And these are all processors that have a few characteristics that are quite unique. First of all, they are all AI-ready processors. The IQ9 has up to 100 TOPS of AI and IQ8 has up to 50 TOPS of AI. These are all safety-rated processors that are designed for ruggedized industrial environments. So these can be used in manufacturing environments, in oil and gas, in very extreme deployments. They are designed with a multi-purpose approach. So these processors are capable of graphics, okay? They can support displays, they can support consumer-facing applications, they can support IoT, but they are also safety-grade processors that can run robotics applications. And the reason we have designed these processors with this fabric is that we are finding more and more that the big shift that is needed in the industrial environment is the ability to be able to bring application and learning from the consumer space yet not lose the reliability, yet not lose the safety context within which you have to go deploy them. And this is something that we have been as a company focused on for a long time. So we bring an ecosystem of partners that have experiences on the hardware and the software side that can go deploy this alongside the IQ series.
We've also deployed a solutions framework.
Yes, so the solutions framework is very interesting because what we focus on more and more is what are the use cases that customers want to use our products for and how do we make that simple and how do we make that straightforward. How do we get them to focus on the things that they are really good at and we abstract the pieces that can be highly reused. So for example, the same solution framework applies across all three processors that we built. The processors have different computing capabilities, that's where we want the customers to spend their time and attention. Independent of these two areas, we also recently concluded an asset acquisition of certain 4G LTE assets from Sequans. So that adds to our industrial connectivity portfolio and we want to bring a lot of those products into a new class of devices and meters and sensors and trackers and actuators. So that also allows us to be able to have now a very broad portfolio on the industrial connectivity side.
So I noticed that the framework has a strong emphasis or focus on construction, factories, warehouses, substations, so the energy sector. And maybe talk a little bit more about, you know, how uptime, reliability, and the high temperatures plays into the need to have this. Like, why are you really going into this industrial space? What's so important today?
