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Cristiano Amon
Chief Executive Officer, President & Director, Qualcomm Inc

Qualcomm’s Computex 2026 Keynote in Less Than 12 Minutes

📅 Jun 01, 2026 CNET 11 MIN 13577 VIEWS 1 SEGMENTS · 1 SPEAKERS
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon outlines how agentic AI is revolutionizing the architecture of our everyday devices at Computex 2026. Discover the future of smart technology across mobile, robotics, automotive, and data centers. 0:00 - Introduction & Computex 2026 Keynote Open 0:09 - How AI is Rewriting Personal Computing 1:12 - Shift to Agentic AI: The New Digital Center 2:11 - The Scale of Global Computing Devices 2:40 - Why Evolving Devices for Agentic AI is Crucial 3:10 - Overcoming Power and Latency Engineering Challenges 4:04 - The Qualcomm Advantage Across the Compute Continuum 5:22 - Brin...

What Cristiano Amon said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, argued that agentic AI is shifting the center of personal computing from the smartphone to the agent itself, making devices mere endpoints. He cited six billion phones, two billion personal AI devices, two billion PCs, and half a billion connected cars as the scale of this shift. Amon stressed that current devices are not designed for agent AI, requiring tight integration across compute domains, strict power and latency constraints, and sensor data for context. He highlighted Qualcomm's advantage in edge computing, from sub-2 milliwatt earbuds to 2000-kilowatt data center solutions. He discussed AI in cars with two layers of intelligence, and robotics as a hierarchical compute system. Amon introduced 6G as the first wireless generation designed for AI, with pillars of connectivity, distributed computing, and sensing. He projected global token demand to rise from 31.7 billion to 1.27 trillion tokens per 10 seconds by 2030, a 40x increase, and announced Qualcomm's new data center product brand, Dragonfly.

Key takeaways

  1. Global token demand per 10 seconds will rise from 31.7 billion to 1.27 trillion by 2030, a 40x increase.
  2. Qualcomm announced Dragonfly as its new data center product brand.
  3. 6G is the first wireless generation designed for AI, with pillars of connectivity, distributed computing, and sensing.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
sub-2 milliwatts power consumption of an earbud with micro-power Wi-Fi metric 0:00
2000-kilowatt power level for data center solutions metric 0:00
31.7 billion global token demand per 10 seconds today metric 0:00
1.27 trillion projected global token demand per 10 seconds in 2030 guidance 0:00
40x increase in token demand from today to 2030 metric 0:00
Cristiano Amon 0:00 ↗
Ladies and gentlemen, Chris, president and CEO of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon. So about two years ago, we talked about how AI will change the human-computer interface and as a consequence will change the architecture of all of our personal computing devices, and that is starting to become a reality in 2026. I'm going to give you some examples. I think what you see today on the screen at home, you're going to have agents going to basically update everyone on your activity and your schedule. All of the things that you need to do at work will be with you, and think about what are the projects that you need to do, what are the tasks that you need to do. It flags the decision and it's going to be working with you. And in your personal life, we'll give you information that is relevant to you, all of the updates that you need, work with you on a schedule. Everything's going to be prioritized and it's going to be a little different. It's going to feel more autonomous. It's going to feel more personal and it's going to feel like really a companion. The phone is the center of a digital life and therefore everything is around the phone, is how we interact with the phone, with the OS and the applications, even the other wearable devices, they are around this phone ecosystem. But now this is different. Those agents become the center of your digital experience. So including the phone and the other devices, they now are around the agent. It's not about an extension of the phone and the digital ecosystem is no longer at the phone itself and the OS and the applications. And what happened? Those devices become endpoints for agents and that's a very important change. Once you understand that change, you understand how the whole mobile industry is going to change. The things that we take for granted today are going to be different tomorrow. I'm going to remind you of what are the scale of those devices. There are about six billion phones today, two billion personal AI devices, which is the evolution of wearables. And that is exactly a small number when you think about those things as an endpoint of agents. Two billion PCs, half a billion connected cars, and people will experience and interact with those agents on these devices. So once you understand the scale, one important message that I want to deliver to you is that today's devices were not designed for those experiences. They're not. It will require a different kind of device when agent AI becomes the number one AI function in our daily lives, especially for personal computing as we interact with those devices. You need to be able to tightly integrate across all the compute domains. You have strict power and latency constraints. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of power. Think about your phone. If it is challenging to make your phone last all day with you operating it, what happens when you and the agent is operating it? That's an incredible engineering challenge from power and latency. You need to have sensor data. Context is super important. Without context, you cannot have the agent to be useful and for you to be useful and be proactive. All of those things are going to be necessary as we think the next generation of devices for the agent AI and an upgrade is truly coming. So you have to come up with solutions that allow you to get all the computing power that you need with the available energy because the battery has to last all day and is limited in its size. And that in itself is the Qualcomm advantage because we have been working with all of those devices at the edge. All of it, and especially the new Qualcomm that had incredibly diversified. We now have an ability to build systems. There's sub-2 milliwatts from an earbud with micro-power Wi-Fi that connect to an agent for personal AI audio device, all the way to kilowatts what's going to happen in the data center. And I think that is the incredible opportunity that we see for us and for our partners when all of those devices are going to change for this future of agentic AI. And for that, you need dedicated computing solutions that scale all the way down to a sub-milliwatt device to a 2000-kilowatt. So I want to start with the devices that are really powered by Snapdragon platforms. You will see agents now being deployed and starting to get scale across phones, PC, and this new category of personal AI devices. The agent isn't tied to the device. It actually moves with the user and is there with the user regardless of the device that you have. So that is one way for you to start to understand this change when the center of the ecosystem, especially mobile, is no longer the smartphone. It's about the agent and the agent's going to be across all of those devices. But it's not just unique to personal computing. The physical world is one of the most exciting areas in our industry right now. When you think about the car, there will be two layers of intelligence. So in the cockpit, AI will personalize your experience. And that is the same thing that we just talked about. The agent is your agent regardless of the device. It doesn't matter if you're going to be in the car, on a personal AI device, on a phone, on your PC, because the agent is at the center, all the devices around it including the car. But also the car has other tasks besides interacting with you, is interacting with you within the context of the car and on the road. You also have physical AI that is perceiving, it is planning, it is acting using cameras, radar, sensors, and maps for your navigation. The entire robotics industry right now has been transformed and robotics is very interesting because it pushes the limit of computing technology and incorporates aspects of what I show you. Incorporates many aspects and technology of what we see in personal computing for sensing, perception, high integration of sensors. The robot, like your glasses, will see what you see, read what you read, understand the context. At the same time, you have all of those elements of technology that comes from the automotive industry. You need precision, you need industrial grade, you need safety, you need redundancy. And to succeed in robotics, you need to understand how to design this as a hierarchical compute system. What we're building is a comprehensive platform across different form factors from AMR, industrial arms, four-legged robots, humanoids, drones, and I actually think industrial opportunity is happening right now. You have to build hardware, you have to build software, you have to build an AI operations, ability to do fleet and data management, and everything that our partners will need to go from prototype to production. When you think about for example the computer vision, you can see I think the role of AI and agentic AI changing everything. Computer vision can run locally on devices. They can run on the cloud. They dynamically can access more powerful models on-prem or on the cloud when needed. They'll be able to see, understand, decide, take action, turning perception into real-time intelligence. Now you have seen agentic AI transforming personal computing and those new classes of personal devices, you see cars, robots, industrial. But there's another layer coming to all of this that will change the equation. And I'm personally very excited about this, is the next generation of wireless. And I am going to explain to you today why this is actually very relevant to the conversation we just had. At Mobile Congress, we described 6G as the first generation of wireless designed for the age of AI. And 6G has three pillars. It's connectivity, it's distributed computing, and it's sensing. This is an exciting future for everything that is happening on the edge because AI is the new form of computing and is going to be how computers are going to run everywhere. So now I'm going to get to the last part of my presentation. It's estimated that the global token demand within 10 seconds is about 31.7 billion tokens. So the projection for 2030 for the same 10 seconds is 1.27 trillion tokens. It's a 40x increase. And that's because agents are going to generate a lot of tokens. So if you think about the latest estimate, and I'm sure that's going to change, but the latest estimate for total token demand globally in 2030 is in the quintillions. I don't even know how to say the number. I'll say it's a four gazillion tokens, the token demand for 2030. So today at Computex, we're announcing the new product brand for Qualcomm data center products. We're already working with hyperscalers and global partners on real-world deployments. We're incredibly excited of this new chapter of the Qualcomm diversification. And now with Dragonfly, our portfolio spans every single tier of the compute continuum. We're incredibly excited about the future of technology across every single device. It's going to get transformed. We show the agents are not coming in the future. They're already here. It's changing a lot of the compute. It's going to generate a lot of demand for new classes of devices and computing. And this upgrade cycle can be one of the largest that the industry has seen. And together we're building the products and the technology that will define this new era.

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Amon, C. (2026, June 1). Qualcomm’s Computex 2026 Keynote in Less Than 12 Minutes [Interview transcript]. CNET. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/955306/

MLA

Cristiano Amon. "Qualcomm’s Computex 2026 Keynote in Less Than 12 Minutes." CNET, 1 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/955306/.

BibTeX
@misc{amon2026_955306,
  author       = {Cristiano Amon},
  title        = {Qualcomm’s Computex 2026 Keynote in Less Than 12 Minutes},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNET. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {jun},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/955306/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}