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Qualcomm CEO who committed to an alliance program by year end and stated Modular was not acquired to be Qualcomm-only software.
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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