Qualcomm unveiled new AI chips designed for data centers that match NVIDIA efficiency with mobile-optimized architecture.

Qualcomm announced on Monday that it will launch data center artificial intelligence chips in 2026, built on the same power-saving technology that powers billions of smartphones, making a major push into AI computing dominated by Nvidia. The San Diego company's stock jumped 11% following the October 27 announcement, with investors cheering Qualcomm's growth beyond its core smartphone business, which has stalled in recent years.

The AI200 and AI250 chips scale up Qualcomm's Hexagon neural processing units found in mobile devices. These neural processing units handle AI tasks on phones without quickly draining batteries, and now Qualcomm is applying that efficiency to massive data centers. As Durga Malladi, Qualcomm's general manager for data center and edge, explained: "We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level." The chips target AI inference—running trained models rather than training new ones—focusing on a fast-growing market segment where power efficiency matters more than raw training power.

The AI200 will ship in 2026, followed by the AI250 in 2027, both available as accelerator cards or as complete liquid-cooled server racks consuming 160 kilowatts of power each. The AI200 features 768 gigabytes of LPDDR memory per card, the low-power RAM used in smartphones, which offers less bandwidth than traditional server memory but costs less and uses less energy. The AI250 takes things further with near-memory computing, delivering over ten times the memory bandwidth of the AI200 while consuming much less power.

Humain, an AI startup backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, has already committed to deploying systems using up to 200 megawatts of power starting in 2026. According to Joe Tigay, portfolio manager of the Rational Equity Armor Fund, "Qualcomm's entry and major deal in Saudi Arabia prove the ecosystem is fragmenting because no single company can meet the global, decentralized need for high-efficiency AI compute." The company will also sell components separately, potentially allowing other chipmakers including Nvidia and AMD to buy Qualcomm's server CPUs or other parts for their own systems.

Qualcomm has diversified recently into laptop chips and automotive processors, though the smartphone market accounts for most of its revenue. The company now competes directly with Nvidia, which controls over 90% of the AI chip market. With nearly $6.7 trillion expected to be spent on data center construction through 2030 according to McKinsey, most of that money will go toward AI computing equipment—a market Qualcomm is determined to capture with its power-efficient approach.