Qualcomm announces China-specific versions of Dragonfly data center portfolio with export-compliant reduced-capability AI accelerators.
Qualcomm has announced plans to bring all four of its Dragonfly data center product lines to China, including custom AI accelerators engineered to stay below U.S. export thresholds, according to CEO Cristiano Amon speaking to Nikkei Asia at the company's investor day in New York.
China supplied 46% of Qualcomm's revenue in 2025, almost entirely from smartphone silicon. Amon's data center strategy mirrors an export-compliant approach that previously cut Nvidia's China accelerator sales to near zero. The Dragonfly portfolio encompasses AI accelerators, data center CPUs, custom silicon, and connectivity chips. "We have versions of all of our products that comply with those guidelines," Amon told Nikkei Asia, noting that Qualcomm is "engaged in conversations" with Chinese customers.
The first accelerator, the AI250, launches next year and employs the company's HBC near-memory design instead of the HBM stacks that Nvidia and AMD rely on—a choice that addresses tight HBM availability in the Chinese market. Qualcomm projects the data center unit will generate $300 million this fiscal year and $5 billion in fiscal year 2027, as part of a total addressable market it estimates will exceed $1 trillion by 2029. The strategy leverages Qualcomm's existing relationships with Chinese phone makers and automakers, the same customer base behind its AI200 and AI250 inference accelerators announced last October.
However, China's market regulator opened an antitrust investigation into Qualcomm's Autotalks acquisition in October and has directed domestic data center operators to source at least 50% of their chips locally while steering Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent toward Huawei and Cambricon products. These pressures have already undermined the export-compliant model Qualcomm seeks to replicate: Nvidia's H20, built specifically for China, generated only about $50 million by late last year, and CEO Jensen Huang stated Nvidia has "zero" China market share remaining. Qualcomm enters this landscape with hardware unavailable to customers until at least fiscal year 2027, by which time Huawei's Ascend line and Cambricon's accelerators are expected to scale production well beyond current volumes.
Qualcomm has confirmed at least one buyer outside China: Saudi Arabia's Humain has already taken delivery of AI100 systems and committed to 200MW of Qualcomm racks. Inside China, the company must convince customers that Beijing continues moving away from foreign silicon.