The chipmaker's new Dragonfly platform aims to thread the needle between US regulations and a market that generates nearly half its revenue
Qualcomm is building data center chips specifically for China, a move designed to stay within US government export restrictions while protecting a market worth nearly half its annual revenue.
The company unveiled its Dragonfly platform during an investor day in New York on June 24, with CEO Cristiano Amon positioning the initiative as both regulatory compliance and aggressive market expansion. The platform will include AI accelerators, data center CPUs, custom silicon, and connectivity products, all engineered to stay beneath the performance thresholds set by US export rules.
The money math behind the pivot #
46% of Qualcomm’s revenue in 2025 came from Chinese customers, mostly through smartphone chip sales. The company forecasts $300 million in data center revenue for the current fiscal year, scaling to $5 billion by fiscal 2027. Qualcomm estimates the broader data center market will surpass $1 trillion by 2029.
The Dragonfly architecture #
The technical pitch centers on bandwidth efficiency. Qualcomm claims the Dragonfly platform delivers 6x bandwidth per watt compared to traditional memory solutions, using what the company calls a high-bandwidth compute architecture.
Manufacturing will rely on TSMC, with Qualcomm partnering with the Taiwanese foundry giant for production scale. The company also recently acquired Modular Inc. in a deal valued at nearly $4 billion, a move that bolsters its software stack for AI workloads.
Meta has adopted the Dragonfly C1000 CPU, giving Qualcomm a marquee customer in the Western data center market alongside its China-focused strategy. The company also revealed ongoing work with ByteDance on custom AI chips that comply with US regulations.
The geopolitical tightrope #
The US has imposed export controls on advanced semiconductors bound for China since October 2022, with successive rounds tightening the restrictions. The rules essentially cap how much compute power can be shipped to Chinese customers.
Nvidia has already walked this path, designing downgraded versions of its GPUs specifically for China. Qualcomm’s approach with Dragonfly appears to bake regulatory constraints into the architecture from the ground up rather than retrofitting existing designs.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our