Person
Brazilian-born engineer who has been president and CEO of Qualcomm since 2021, leading its push beyond smartphone chips into PCs, automotive and AI.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says AI firms want phones running 100-billion-parameter models continuously by 2028, more than triple his newest chips' limit. Most of Qualcomm's plan for closing that gap is memory, the cost Amon says already deters phone upgrades.
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Qualcomm launched two 2nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 phone chips in Maui and pitched them for on-device AI agents, with an NPU up to 35% faster. The standard chip's NPU gains 14%, so agents meant for the widest set of phones get the smaller jump.
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Qualcomm's new top-tier Snapdragon can run a 30-billion-parameter model on the handset. The memory that makes on-device AI work is also the cost Counterpoint blames for an expected 14% fall in 2026 shipments.
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The two companies say the collaboration covers custom AWS inference silicon and optical connectivity up to 1.6T. The firmest number in it is the $161.26 exercise price on Amazon's warrants for 25 million Qualcomm shares.
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Three weeks after closing on Modular, Qualcomm put Mojo under Apache 2.0 and extended support to six vendors' chips. The bet is that the arbitrage layer beats the lock-in.
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