Qualcomm’s big AI gamble: Breaking Nvidia’s chips stronghold

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon unveiled a five-year plan to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI chips for data centers, projecting over $15 billion in annual AI component sales by fiscal 2029. The company also announced the $3.9 billion acquisition of AI software firm Modular to compete with Nvidia's CUDA platform, sending shares up 15% before a broader tech sell-off erased gains.

Qualcomm https://fortune.com/company/qualcomm/ has long been known primarily as the maker of smartphone chips, but since taking the reins five years ago, CEO Cristiano Amon has worked to change that and equip the company for the tough but lucrative AI chip wars. Since 2021, Qualcomm has reinvented itself to become a major player in newer areas such as tech for cars—including driver-assistance and connected-vehicle systems±—and chips to power smart home devices and wearables. Now, Amon has a more ambitious target in his sights: His five-year plan, presented to investors this week, is nothing less than a challenge to Nvidia’s long dominance in the market for A.I. chips for data centers. At Qualcomm’s investor day in Manhattan on Wednesday, he and his team unveiled its latest lines of AI accelerators and central processing units CPUs . Taking Nvidia on won’t be easy for Qualcomm. After all, Nvidia—the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of $4.7 trillion—is the market leader by far in AI chips. “A lot of people ask, ‘Oh, in this crowded market, is it too late? It’s never too late for Qualcomm,” Amon told a packed room of Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. Investors seemed to agree with Amon’s assessment: Qualcomm shares shot up as much as 15% on Wednesday when the chipmaker forecast annual sales of more than $15 billion from A.I. components in data centers by fiscal 2029. By Friday, those share gains had mostly evaporated, as Qualcomm was dragged down by the sell-off hitting many large tech stocks on the Nasdaq. Qualcomm also projected annual revenue of $40 billion for its businesses excluding handsets, long its big revenue driver, by 2029. That’s double a long-range forecast from two years ago and a signal that Qualcomm is making progress in its efforts to rely less on mobile phone chips. Qualcomm’s investor day featured video endorsements from the CEOs of Meta https://fortune.com/company/facebook/ and Microsoft https://fortune.com/company/microsoft/ , Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella respectively, and senior executives from Amazon https://fortune.com/company/amazon-com/ and Google extolling the virtues of Qualcomm’s tech. Amon said he recognizes the public’s concerns about AI and data centers, with their massive power needs, and he sees that as an opportunity to stand out by offering products like power-efficient CPUs. “There is pushback,” he said, “but that’s good because it is going to drive the industry to look for alternatives.” The Qualcomm executives’ presentations were dizzying, with so many initiatives being pursued at once: In addition to the data center efforts, the company is pushing further into the automotive space, and taking on Intel https://fortune.com/company/intel/ and AMD https://fortune.com/company/advanced-micro-devices/ , among others, in the PC chips market. The company will also be busy integrating a large new venture: This week, Qualcomm announced the $3.9 billion acquisition of AI software company Modular, which gives Qualcomm a software platform to compete with Nvidia’s CUDA. That platform allows users to develop AI programs and services and take full advantage of Nvidia’s graphics processing units GPUs , leading many developers who write programs to stick with Nvidia. Modular is an attempt to weaken that Nvidia dominance. Amon, a Brazilian engineer who joined Qualcomm 30 years ago and became its CEO in 2021, dismisses the notion that this is all too much for Qualcomm to chase at once, saying the company has been on this reinvention path many times before. “We have a very, very strong engineering culture. It’s a company that is not afraid of taking on completely new challenges,” he told Fortune , declaring that “it’s been a pressure cooker for each one of the years since we started.” Amon recalled facing questions in 2021 about why Qualcomm was chasing so many rabbits at once, between developing its automotive business, its PC chips and industrial applications. “Because we can,” he recalled answering the skeptics. “And now we have the exact same thing.” Still, a successful reinvention requires getting the troops on board. “You have to overcommunicate, you have to have clarity of vision, and you need to do it as many times as is necessary to make sure everybody understands it,” said Amon. “It’s like you see in those movies, before a big battle, the general goes in front of the troops and makes a speech, because people are going to have to believe in it to really commit.” Subscribe to Fortune Gulf Brief . Every Tuesday, this new newsletter delivers clear-eyed, authoritative intelligence on the deals, decisions, policies, and power shifts shaping one of the world’s most consequential regions, written for the people who need to act on it.