Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm Inc
Qualcomm Actively Involved In Semicon Design: Qualcomm CFO & COO Akash Palkhiwala
Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm's CFO and COO, outlines the company's roadmap for the Indian market and more.
qualcomm #akashpalkhiwala #semiconductor #chipdesign #technews #businessnews #semicon #electronics #innovation #india #globaltech #manufacturing #chipindustry #breakingnews #latestnews #cnbctv18
🔴CNBC TV18 LIVE TV: https://youtube.com/live/P857H4ej-MQ
SUBSCRIBE to our Channel: https://bit.ly/3nvEcxf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
👑 Check Out Top CNBC TV18 Playlist Videos:
🔹https://www.youtube.com/p...
About Akash Palkhiwala
Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm’s CFO and COO, participated in the company’s Investor Day on June 24, 2026, where Qualcomm announced a revised fiscal 2029 revenue target of $40 billion, nearly double the $22 billion target set 18 months earlier. Palkhiwala described the company’s AI data center push as a key inflection point, naming Meta Platforms and Microsoft as early customers. He stated that Qualcomm is targeting $15 billion in data center revenue by fiscal 2029, calling the overall market a “trillion-dollar market” and saying a roughly 5% share is “very reasonable.” He also said Qualcomm is bringing its low-power processing technology from edge devices to data centers, describing data centers as “token factories” where the company’s accelerator delivers tokens at the lowest power. On the company’s Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings call in April, Palkhiwala reported revenues of $10.6 billion and non-GAAP EPS of $2.65, with $3.7 billion returned to stockholders. He noted that QCT handset revenues from Chinese customers had been impacted by memory supply constraints driven by AI data center demand, and forecast that those revenues would bottom in the third quarter before returning to sequential growth. He also said Qualcomm expects initial shipments for a custom silicon engagement at a leading hyperscaler later in calendar 2026. In a May interview in India, Palkhiwala discussed Qualcomm’s involvement in semiconductor design and said the company expects to become one of the largest customers for India’s manufacturing ecosystem.
Transcript (21 segments)
I
Interviewer0:01
Hello and welcome to this very special broadcast right here on CNBC TV18. I'm in conversation with Mr. Palkhiwala, the CFO and the COO of Qualcomm. He's speaking to us at the new launches about what the India market represents and what the opportunities may look like going forward, a roadmap of sorts as far as Qualcomm in India in 2026 is concerned. Mr. Palkhiwala, thank you so much for hosting us. Big day today, Snapdragon for India. Tell us what's special about today, what are the big takeaways that we can walk away from after today's launch?
A
Akash Palkhiwala0:31
So first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I think we're very excited about the products we're launching. The specific announcements we're going to do is we're going to announce two new products for the smartphone industry. These are products that are very much designed with India in mind. These are global launches of these products, right? So we're launching them in India for the global market. But as I said, designed for India, designed in India, and then tremendous opportunity I think what it brings to us is taking these products and selling them globally. But I think there's a bigger story. The bigger story is really how Qualcomm is evolving. We started off as a smartphone company, but now we're the leader in automotive. We are building products for PCs. We're building products for personal AI devices like glasses and watches and hearables and other things. We are also entering robotics now. I think that's going to be one of the largest markets in the world going forward. All kinds of robotics is happening. Personal robotics, manufacturing robotics, industrial robotics, and so Qualcomm aspires to be a leader in that. And then as we've announced over the last couple of weeks, we are entering the data center chip market as well. So lots of technologies that we have really common across all these areas, and we are bringing them to bear in different markets. So that's kind of the backdrop behind product announcement.
I
Interviewer1:52
Even as we speak, the government is contemplating, it's nearing the final stages, at least that's what officials within the government tell us on ISM 2.0, India Semiconductor Mission 2.0. They're looking at an outlay of over 1 lakh crore rupees, that would be somewhere north of 10 billion dollars that the government is looking to put out for supporting the industry. What would your expectations be from a Qualcomm, from a fabless perspective?
A
Akash Palkhiwala2:15
Yeah, so think about semiconductor in two parts, really. There's design and there's manufacturing, right? Qualcomm is obviously actively involved in design. And we have, as I said earlier, a very large team here that helps us design. The second part is manufacturing. And where we don't do the manufacturing ourselves, but we can be a very critical and important customer for the manufacturing ecosystem that gets created in India. And we've been already doing that for a while, right? So, very close relationship with the Tata Group. There are other companies that will be working with as they grow as well. But as soon as the technologies that we need are available in India, we're going to use the ecosystem that gets created. We've also been very closely partnering with the government of India, right? Giving input as the policies get finalized. Because I really do think that Qualcomm will become one of the largest customers for the manufacturing ecosystem in India and we're just at the beginning of that process.
I
Interviewer3:20
You mentioned Qualcomm being a fabless company partnering with players like Tata's. Can you tell us when can we expect the first made in India Qualcomm chip to perhaps roll out, any indication, timelines you would want to share?
A
Akash Palkhiwala3:32
Not at this point. I think what I'll say is the manufacturing, a lot of manufacturing that Qualcomm does is incredibly advanced nodes, right? And so as those nodes get built in India with Tata and with others, we'll be standing first in line to use the capacity.
I
Interviewer3:50
You had alluded to in the very first answer about how data center chips is one area that Qualcomm is betting big on. Tell us about that and how does that weave into the India story? In over the last few months we've seen some mammoth commitments by big hyperscalers, even Indian players as well as to the data center ecosystem. Tell us, you'll be competing with the likes of Nvidia. How does that look like? And how does the India opportunity look like with the data center boom?
A
Akash Palkhiwala4:16
Yeah, I think because we're in so many edge devices, the way we had built all of our technology is hyper high performance at low power. Right? If you think about the data centers now, one of the key problem statements is power constraints. Like data centers are being built next to power plants. And power plants are sometimes being built next to data centers so that you can have the power that's required to operate them. And so Qualcomm is going to bring its unique strength. We're building three different parts to our data center opportunity. First is a CPU chip, right? We have arguably the most high performing CPU in the world. And so we're going to bring them from edge devices to data center. Especially as this agentic transformation happens within data center, our CPU chips are going to bring the strengths that are required for agentic AI workloads in data centers. The second is AI accelerators which has been a vast majority of the market. Qualcomm, we have something called our NPU which is our neural processing unit, which is extremely high performance at low power. We're going to bring it with some novel packaging that happens with memory for a certain type of workloads. And so that's excited about that. What we also announced at our earnings a couple weeks ago is we're going to build a custom chip for a hyperscaler that will start shipping later this year. So a lot of different opportunities. We're exploring all of them at the same time. This is obviously a very, very large market with enough room for multiple players, and Qualcomm is now going to be one of the key players.
I
Interviewer5:56
As far as the India market, again, predominantly driven by smartphones. The sales, and this is not unique to India, this is seen across a lot of major geographies as well. Flat sales, flat growth in sales, rather. Is that a challenge for you when you look at in terms of demand outlook?
A
Akash Palkhiwala6:10
You know, it's like there's two ways to look at the market. You can look at the units, or you can look at the available kind of dollars, right? And so one of the big trends that has happened in really the global market is the premiumization of smartphones. As people buy new smartphones, they're gearing up. It is becoming, if you could even imagine, it's going to become an even more important device to people's lives than it has been in the past. And so there's been consistent mix shift up within the global unit framework. And so while the total units have not grown, the amount of dollars that are available to Qualcomm has grown very significantly as a part of that process. So, we've seen the benefit of that. Our business, our revenue stream has grown a lot within phones. And so we are very strong at the top of the roadmap, premium chips. Qualcomm is by far the leader in Android, and so we're seeing the benefit of that show up. One of the metrics that I'll always remember is over the last year, there's 24% growth in India for phones over $400. Right? And so that's a pretty powerful number. I mean, that's in a flat market, when you see that kind of growth in premium devices, it shows you what the opportunity is.
I
Interviewer7:25
Speaking of, again, the smartphone market, I want to get a sense as to the dynamic that high memory costs brings to the table. How does that impact you? What is the impact that you're seeing now? What impact you estimate say perhaps towards the second half of 2026, the impact on OEMs or manufacturers again of high memory?
A
Akash Palkhiwala7:48
Yeah, so the landscape of the industry is being driven by AI demand within data centers, which consumes a lot of memory. And so what that does is it puts pressure on the memory supply and pricing that's available for things like smartphones, right? And so what we've seen happen as a result of it is the smartphone OEMs have been very cautious in building phones because of these constraints. And so we've seen an impact on our financials over the last two quarters. What we did say at earnings is we expect the June quarter to be the bottom and to grow from that point. And so it is an impact, it's an issue that we're dealing with in the short term.
I
Interviewer8:33
Let's also talk about another area that Qualcomm has been bullish on, which is the auto industry. We've seen in the last few months a digital chassis, that's what Qualcomm has been building. Tell us, how is that journey progressing with respect to India? Are you finding a lot of takers here in the India market? Is there an appetite for such connected features? And what are you working with any projections going forward?
A
Akash Palkhiwala8:54
Yeah, so I mean tremendous transformation in the automotive industry, right? And there's two separate trends. There is the electrification of cars. You're building electric cars versus IC. The second trend is digitization of cars, which is you're connecting the cars to the cloud. The car experience inside the car is a smartphone tablet-like experience. And then you're adding autonomous driving features to the car as well. And so Qualcomm plays in the second kind of big trend, right? We make chips that connect the car to the cloud. We make chips that enable the experience inside the car and then autonomous driving. Those are very very long-term trends that is changing incredibly fast. And so it's not just in cars, I think you're going to see it in two-wheelers as well. And Qualcomm is participating, really working with all the leaders in the Indian automotive industry on all kinds of chips, right? For these transformations. So very excited. I think we're going to become one of the key players, if we are not already one of the key players, key suppliers of technology into the automotive industry as the industry transforms. And then I think I'd add robotics as kind of an extension of automotive industry in some ways. A robot is a car standing up, right? And just like you have autonomous driving, autonomous movement for robotics is an extension of that as well. And so we're going to take our digital chassis products and extend them into robotics. And so super excited about that as really an expansion of our automotive opportunity.
I
Interviewer10:35
What is the traction that you've managed to find so far with the Indian market? Any big players that you're already working with?
A
Akash Palkhiwala10:41
Pretty much everyone. All the big automotive companies are working with Qualcomm. They're using our chips to connect to the cloud. The inside experience within the cars, I mean, the new cars are being launched are tremendous, right? Very, very interesting stuff. So they're all big customers now and I think it's going to be the case for a long period of time.
I
Interviewer11:03
And I'll just end with one forward-looking question. On one aspect that in fact has managed to hit the headlines across the world, and this is about frontier AI models. The likes of Mytho, the likes of GPT 5.5. There are concerns being expressed by stakeholders, whether that's in the banking sector, whether that's regulators, whether that's governments, on what this means. We're learning about capabilities of these models which are vastly superior to what we have today, extremely efficient at finding vulnerabilities. How much of a concern is that? How are you looking at it?
A
Akash Palkhiwala11:38
Yeah, so you know, all of these technology transformations always come with risks beyond the opportunities, right? And the role of the technology industry is to harvest the opportunities to protect against the risk. And so I think the entire ecosystem very focused on that. Of course with these new models coming in, that is a great way to know the vulnerabilities in the products that we are making. And so what we would want to do is run those models on our own products. Find the vulnerabilities, fix them. There is a risk that comes with it, but to me that's kind of something you protect against, but focus on the opportunity, the innovation that these models are going to bring.
I
Interviewer12:20
Do you see Qualcomm being a part of something like a project Last Wing to understand what this technology can unpack in the days, weeks, months to come?
A
Akash Palkhiwala12:28
I mean all of these frontier models, we're at the front end of testing them, using them, creating products with them, creating products for them. And so that's not going to change. I think we're going to continue to do that.
I
Interviewer12:41
Well, we're clearly in the midst of exciting times, Mr. Palkhiwala. Thank you once again for having us.