Qualcomm, the company best known for making chips for smartphones, is jumping into the red-hot market for artificial intelligence, announcing on Monday that it will release its own AI accelerator chips for data centers. The move is a direct challenge to Nvidia, which has so far completely dominated the AI hardware market. The news sent Qualcomm’s stock soaring 15%.
This is a major strategic shift for Qualcomm, which is now looking to grab a piece of the fastest-growing market in all of technology. The company will release two new AI chips, the AI200 in 2026 and the AI250 in 2027. These chips will be sold in a full, liquid-cooled server rack system, similar to what Nvidia and AMD offer, allowing dozens of chips to work together as one massive computer.
Qualcomm says its new chips will focus on “inference,” which is the process of running an already-trained AI model, rather than the “training” process used to create the models in the first place. The company claims its new systems will be cheaper to operate and more power-efficient than the competition.
The AI chip market is currently a one-horse race, with Nvidia controlling over 90% of it. But as demand for AI computing power continues to explode, big companies like OpenAI are actively seeking alternatives. Qualcomm’s entry into the market is a clear sign that competition is about to get much more intense.
