Qualcomm is designing custom chips for AWS across multiple product generations, with a focus on AI inference. The two companies are also working on optical interconnects with bandwidth up to 1.6 terabits to handle the growing data traffic in AI infrastructure. Qualcomm brings its track record in power-efficient chip design, while Amazon contributes its cloud infrastructure. In return, Qualcomm uses AWS services like Amazon Bedrock to speed up its chip design process.
Amazon is Qualcomm's third big data center win since June. Meta is taking the Dragonfly C1000 server processor, and Microsoft is deploying Qualcomm's HBC memory architecture in Azure. Qualcomm aims to hit $15 billion in data center revenue by 2029.
AWS is adding Qualcomm's designs alongside its own Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chip families. The move targets inference workloads, where energy cost per token drives the bottom line. Efficiency is also Qualcomm's focus at the other end of the stack, on edge devices. In March, Qualcomm's AI research division released a framework that runs reasoning models on smartphones.
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