Qualcomm announces AI chips to compete with AMD and Nvidia

Qualcomm announced Monday that it will release new artificial intelligence accelerator chips, marking new competition for Nvidia, which has so far dominated the market for AI semiconductors.

The AI chips are a shift from Qualcomm, which has thus far focused on semiconductors for wireless connectivity and mobile devices, not massive data centers.

Qualcomm said that both the AI200, which will go on sale in 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, can come in a system that fills up a full, liquid-cooled server rack.

Qualcomm is matching Nvidia and AMD, which offer their graphics processing units, or GPUs, in full-rack systems that allow as many as 72 chips to act as one computer. AI labs need that computing power to run the most advanced models.

Qualcomm’s data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm’s smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs.

“We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.

The entry of Qualcomm into the data center world marks new competition in the fastest-growing market in technology: equipment for new AI-focused server farms.

Nearly $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures will be spent on data centers through 2030, with the majority going to systems based around AI chips, according to a McKinsey estimate.