Senior Vice President and GM of Automotive & Cloud Computing of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Qualcomm
ET9 Talks Ep 48 Dialogue with Mr Nakul Duggal, Executive Vice President at Qualcomm #nio
Nio is the leader in the premium luxury electric vehicle space in China #nio.
About Nakul Duggal
Nakul Duggal, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Automotive & Cloud Computing at Qualcomm, has been active in discussing the company's strategy around physical AI, automotive technology, and robotics. In a March 2026 interview with NEURA Robotics, Duggal said that the idea of automating what humans do in a heterogeneous physical environment is a "new concept" that is "starting to get explored very rapidly." He stated that "the future will not be decided on screens" but "built in the physical world through powerful partnerships." At Qualcomm's Investor Day in June 2026, Duggal described physical AI as "the next great computing wave" that runs on the edge, not in the cloud, and said the addressable market for automotive, industrial, and robotics is expected to grow from $300 billion to over a trillion dollars within the next decade, with robotics becoming a very large segment. In the automotive sector, Duggal announced a partnership with Stellantis in May 2026, stating that Qualcomm will deploy its digital chassis platform across all of Stellantis's brands starting in model year 2028, covering connectivity, in-cabin experience, and self-driving software. He noted that Qualcomm's automotive business has grown at about 25% annually and is expected to exit fiscal 2026 at $6 billion in annualized revenue. At the Qualcomm Auto Summit in June 2026, Duggal explained that the company decided three years ago to "overdimension the silicon" and build a mixed-critical architecture that allows cockpit and ADAS systems to run on the same platform, calling this approach "Flex." He also said the industry is moving from software-defined vehicles to AI-defined vehicles.
Transcript (19 segments)
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Nakul Duggal0:00
I'm here every 3 months, every 4 months. You know what I really like about it is that the rate of adoption of AI in China is just fantastic, but it would only be possible if you did not have companies like NIO and so many of your other competitors build such fantastic products so quickly.
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William Li0:19
Hi, this is the executive vice president of Qualcomm globally. Say hi, say hello. Great to be with you, William, and thank you.
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Nakul Duggal0:29
How about Beijing Auto Show?
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William Li0:31
Fantastic, probably double of what I was expecting. It's crazy. I was just hearing about how many cars have been launched already. 18 new models in 2026. Lots of launching events in the past several days.
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Nakul Duggal0:44
Yeah. And you know what, William, what amazed me was the variety of cars. So now of course it's the smart cabin, it's the smart living space, it's ADAS, but the variety and the differentiation, the types of lifestyle cars is fantastic. Very, very impressed. But most of the cars are based on the smart cabin or based on the Qualcomm solution here. So we are very happy. We are very happy. We are very happy.
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William Li1:12
I think, yeah, that's why I said Qualcomm and NIO, they innovated a lot of new technology in the past several years at the very beginning.
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Nakul Duggal1:22
You know, for me, what I'm very grateful for is we built so many partnerships with so many companies including NIO many years ago, 5, 6 years ago. And the vision that you all had in terms of what the car needs to look like, we have been included as part of that vision. And as the cars have evolved, as AI has come in, and there was no AI 6 years ago, no one talked about AI. But now as AI comes in, it just becomes a part and parcel of that experience. Just being able to grow with the ecosystem, we are very grateful for.
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William Li1:53
I remember several years ago when we talked about the future of the car, we said the car will become a smart mobile living room. So now it's reality. It's real, it's real, yes. So now everyone is talking about the AI. So what's the plan for Qualcomm, the smart AI cabin?
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Nakul Duggal2:15
So I think the car is a very unique platform where it has to be real time. It can't depend upon, you can't imagine that your connectivity will be there if it's not there, what do we do? So AI has to run in the car. Now obviously with ADAS, it already runs in the car. It is real time, it is safety grade. To be able to run AI in the car for experiences that you build, it comes down to the capability of the model. And the models are getting very capable. If I think about models that are textual, they're already becoming very intelligent. So we are spending now with our latest Snapdragon Gen 5, we can support mixture of experts model running locally. You don't have to go to the cloud.
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William Li2:54
It has to, it has to, it has to. It can't, you can't depend on the cloud.
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Nakul Duggal3:00
Yeah, you should have a local computer. And in fact, it has to be multimodal because now with vision, language, action models, you have to be able to not just look at video, audio, text interaction, what was actually meant. So this has now started and I expect over the next 2 years you will start to see a tremendous amount of innovation where if you can understand what the customer, what the user is trying to do, you can interpret locally what the experience looks like. So it'll be multimodal. That I think is one major big shift that we are starting to see. I think the other is, you know, and you start to see robotics now around us so much, the car is becoming this physical embodiment.
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William Li3:40
It's already a robot when you are driving. The experience inside is one thing, then what is the experience going to look like when you have time by yourself? Can you talk to an agent? Can you talk to an avatar?
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Nakul Duggal3:54
So the platform is a very unique platform because there is no such platform where you're spending so much time moving from A to B. The platform is autonomous. The experience inside is agentic. That is why for us it's very important to make sure that we keep pushing the boundary of AI inside the cabin because we feel like experiences will keep evolving. That's what we are spending time on. That's why, by the way, we introduced Gen 5 early last year. We will launch 15 OEMs in 2026. 15 in 2026 that we know of now. So there may be more, we are only in April.
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William Li4:27
And they are developing NOMI intelligence based on the Qualcomm solution and the performance is very, very good. And then we developed several series of models based on Qualcomm chips. So the performance is above our expectation. So it's thanks for the support of the two teams, the ecosystem. That's the most important part of the Qualcomm solutions.
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Nakul Duggal4:54
That is great to hear. And what I love to hear from you, William, is you bet on our platform for so many generations. You keep improving the quality of the experience. We have a certain baseline experience, we keep adding to it, and then with the AI, you just improve, you just bring in a brand new experience. Being able to have that kind of a partnership and relationship with your teams, we are just very proud to be part of it. Sometimes our team is tasked because they want to push the limit.
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William Li5:19
Lots of requests from Qualcomm.
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Nakul Duggal5:20
Yes. And that is frankly very important for us because we want to work with customers. We want to work with partners who will push the boundaries of the platform, of the technology, also of time because it's a very competitive market and things are moving very fast. So we would not be where we are, we would not have the success if we did not have partners. I'm here every 3 months, every 4 months. You know what I really like about it is that the rate at which the consumer is able to adopt new technology also has to be there for companies like NIO to be able to introduce new technology. And so what is marvelous for me is to be able to have this continuous cycle of being able to move faster and faster for better and better capability. Like the rate of adoption of AI in China is just fantastic, but it would not be possible if you did not have companies like NIO and so many of your other competitors build such fantastic products so quickly. So that is really fantastic.
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William Li6:17
Yes, thank you, thank you, William. Thank you both again. Very good to see you.
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Nakul Duggal6:21
Thank you.