Qualcomm expects data center revenue above $650 million in December quarter

Qualcomm says its data center business should bring in more than $650 million in the December quarter. That would make one three-month stretch bigger than the segment’s entire previous fiscal year.

The guidance arrived with Qualcomm’s fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 earnings release, dated November 4, 2026. It signals that the company’s push into AI infrastructure is moving from slide decks to shipping docks.

From pilot program to real revenue

The December quarter is the first quarter of Qualcomm’s fiscal 2027. The company tied the expected jump to two product lines now hitting customers.

Custom AI accelerators began shipping in October. Connectivity solutions for Amazon Web Services are expected to ramp in November.

The scale-up looks steep on paper. Qualcomm’s data center segment generated $476 million across all of fiscal 2026. The December-quarter guidance of more than $650 million would beat that full-year figure in a single quarter.

The company has bigger numbers in mind. Qualcomm is targeting $5 billion in data center revenue for full fiscal 2027, which would be more than ten times the fiscal 2026 total.

It also aims to exit fiscal 2027 at a $7 billion annualized run-rate. That metric takes the pace of the final stretch of the year and projects it across twelve months. A $7 billion run-rate works out to about $1.75 billion per quarter.

Further out, Qualcomm is aiming for more than $15 billion in annual data center revenue by fiscal 2029.

Who is buying

The headline relationship is with Amazon. In September 2026, the two companies signed a multi-generational deal covering custom silicon. It includes up to $60 billion in potential purchases over ten years.

The phrase “up to” matters a great deal there. That figure is a ceiling, not a check that has already cleared.

Meta is also on the customer list. The social media giant has committed to using Qualcomm’s Dragonfly C1000 CPU.

Qualcomm is focusing much of this effort on AI inference workloads. Training is the expensive, compute-heavy process of teaching a model. Inference is the part where that model actually answers questions, generates text, or recognizes images for real users, over and over again.

The quarter that set the stage

The data center guidance came alongside a fiscal fourth quarter that beat Wall Street expectations.

Qualcomm reported non-GAAP revenue of $10.44 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.17. Both figures came in ahead of analyst estimates.

Automotive was the standout. That segment posted a record $1.99 billion in revenue, up 89% year over year.

Qualcomm projects non-handset revenue, including automotive, IoT, and data center, will grow more than 60% year over year in fiscal 2027. The company expects that group to become the majority of its chip revenue.

What this means for Qualcomm and the AI chip race

The December quarter now becomes a key checkpoint. If Qualcomm clears $650 million, it supports the credibility of the $5 billion full-year target.

Execution risk is real. Moving from $476 million in a year to a $7 billion annualized pace requires manufacturing, supply, and customer deployments to line up quickly. Any delay in the Amazon connectivity ramp or the accelerator rollout would show up fast in quarterly numbers.

Customer concentration is another factor to watch. Having Amazon and Meta as anchors is a strength today. But it also means a meaningful share of the segment’s trajectory depends on spending decisions made by a small number of very large buyers.

Qualcomm’s bet on inference, rather than training, suggests it is aiming at the part of the market where efficiency and cost per query may matter as much as raw horsepower.

The specific things to track are straightforward. Watch whether December-quarter data center revenue lands above $650 million. Watch whether the AWS connectivity ramp proceeds as planned. And watch whether non-handset revenue keeps pace with the projected 60%-plus growth.