Qualcomm’s FY2027 Q1 guidance includes first custom chip shipments to two hyperscalers

Qualcomm has spent years being described as a smartphone chip company. Its latest guidance suggests it would like that description retired.

CFO Akash Palkhiwala said the company’s first-quarter guidance for fiscal 2027 includes initial shipments of custom chips to two hyperscale cloud customers. That makes the next quarter the official starting line for Qualcomm’s data center revenue.

The disclosure arrived with Qualcomm’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings release on November 4, 2026. It also landed in a quarter when the company’s core phone business had a rough showing.

What Qualcomm is guiding to

The headline item is simple. Custom silicon built for two of the world’s largest cloud operators is expected to begin shipping in Q1 of FY2027.

One of the two customers is known. Amazon Web Services signed an agreement with Qualcomm in September 2026 focused on AI inference workloads, and that deal is set to start contributing revenue in Q1 FY2027.

Inference is the part of AI that happens after a model is trained. It is the work of actually answering queries and generating outputs, over and over, at scale.

The second customer has not been named. Qualcomm described it only as a global-scale hyperscaler.

The company anticipates that this unnamed client will match Amazon’s contribution. Each of the two is expected to generate at least $1 billion in FY2027 revenue.

The Amazon deal, by the numbers

The AWS agreement includes a warrant for Qualcomm shares potentially worth up to $4 billion.

The deal also carries expected purchases of up to $60 billion over 10 years. That is a ceiling, not a guarantee, but it signals how large the relationship could become if demand holds.

Why the pivot matters now

Qualcomm’s handset chip revenue fell 26% year-over-year in Q4, landing at $5.137 billion.

Automotive offered a counterweight. Revenue in that segment reached $1.99 billion, up 89% from a year earlier.

Management, including Palkhiwala and CEO Cristiano Amon, leaned into that framing. The company is projecting that non-handset revenues will grow more than 60% year-over-year in FY2027.

Qualcomm also reiterated its $5 billion target for data center revenue.

What this means for Qualcomm and its investors

The phrasing of the Amazon numbers deserves attention. The warrant is potentially worth up to $4 billion, and purchases are expected to reach up to $60 billion over 10 years. Both figures describe upper bounds, so actual results will depend on how much Amazon ultimately buys.

For investors, the quarterly reports over the course of FY2027 will be the real test. The key items to watch are whether data center revenue appears on schedule in Q1, whether each hyperscaler clears the $1 billion mark for the year, and whether non-handset growth tracks the more than 60% projection.