BlockBeats message: On June 27, according to a report by (Fortune), Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon is trying to shift the company away from primarily relying on smartphone chips and toward diversified businesses such as AI chips, automotive, PCs, smart home, and wearable devices. He plans to make the next focus the data-center AI chip market and challenge Nvidia’s long-standing dominant position. At an investor day event held in Manhattan this past Wednesday, Qualcomm unveiled its latest AI accelerator and CPU product lines. Amon said that people often question whether Qualcomm is already too late in the highly competitive AI chip market, but he claims, “For Qualcomm, it’s never too late.”

Qualcomm expects that by fiscal year 2029, annual sales of its data center AI components will exceed $15 billion. Driven by this, Qualcomm’s stock surged as much as 15% on Wednesday, but by Friday most of those gains had been given back due to heavy selling of large technology stocks listed on the Nasdaq. Qualcomm also expects that by 2029, annual revenue from businesses other than its mobile segment will reach $40 billion—twice its long-term forecast from two years ago—showing that the company’s efforts to reduce reliance on phone chips are starting to pay off. Amon said public concerns about the massive energy consumption of AI and data centers, rather than hurting Qualcomm, present an opportunity for the company to differentiate through products such as high-efficiency CPUs.

In addition, Qualcomm announced this week that it will acquire AI software company Modular for $3.9 billion to obtain a software platform that can compete with NVIDIA’s CUDA. CUDA enables developers to build AI applications and fully leverage NVIDIA GPUs—one of the main reasons many developers continue to stay in NVIDIA’s ecosystem. Modular, meanwhile, is seen as an attempt by Qualcomm to weaken NVIDIA’s software advantage. Amon said Qualcomm has a very strong engineering culture and is not afraid to take on brand-new challenges. He added that since 2021 the company has repeatedly pushed through business transformations across areas such as automotive, PC chips, and industrial applications, and it is now entering a similar phase.