Qualcomm CEO says company is in advanced talks with a data center customer on custom silicon

Qualcomm wants a seat at the data center table again, and it says it has found someone willing to pull out a chair.

CEO Cristiano Amon said the company is in advanced discussions with a data center accelerator customer about future custom silicon. That signals Qualcomm’s second attempt at the server market is moving from slide decks toward actual purchase orders.

What Amon actually said

The comments came during Qualcomm’s Q2 FY2026 earnings call on April 29, 2026. Amon described the counterparty as a leading hyperscaler. That is industry shorthand for the giant cloud operators that buy chips by the warehouse.

The talks are not finished. The company characterized them as advanced, which is a meaningful step past exploratory but still short of a signed contract.

Timing is where it gets concrete. Initial shipments of the custom silicon are expected in December 2026, landing late in the calendar year.

Qualcomm is also framing the relationship as multi-generational. Rather than a one-off chip, the plan points to a series of designs built for the same customer over several product cycles.

The hardware behind the pitch

Qualcomm’s data center ambitions run through a product family it calls Dragonfly. The portfolio spans several layers of the stack rather than a single chip.

On the compute side, it includes the C1000 CPU. For AI workloads, there are the AI200 and AI300 series of inference accelerators. The lineup also includes high-bandwidth memory.

The focus on inference is deliberate. Training builds an AI model once, while inference is the work of running that model every time someone asks it a question. As AI products scale to millions of users, the inference bill keeps growing.

The custom design capability got a boost from Qualcomm’s $2.4 billion acquisition of Alphawave. The deal strengthened its ability to build application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, which are chips tailored to one customer’s exact workload instead of sold off the shelf.

Second time around

This is not Qualcomm’s first lap around the data center track. The company exited the business in 2018, stepping away from an earlier server chip effort.

Qualcomm has put real numbers on the ambition. The company expects annual data center revenue to exceed $15 billion by fiscal 2029.

It is also pointing to a total addressable market of $1 trillion for data center solutions, and it aims to capture a share of that pool.

What this means for Qualcomm and the chip race

For investors, the hyperscaler talks are the first tangible test of whether the data center plan can generate revenue on the timeline management has laid out. A $15 billion target for fiscal 2029 needs customers lined up well before then, and December 2026 shipments would be an early marker.

The risks are equally clear. Advanced talks can still stall, and the customer has not been publicly named. Until a contract is confirmed, the opportunity remains a forecast rather than booked revenue.