Qualcomm lands AWS deal for custom chips, interconnects

Qualcomm and Amazon Web Services will develop multiple generations of custom chips for the cloud provider as part of a broad partnership.

In a statement and regulatory filings, Qualcomm laid out the following:

• Qualcomm and AWS will develop customized silicon for AWS AI infrastructure.
• The chips will focus on AI inference.
• Qualcomm's optical connectivity offering will be used in high-bandwidth interconnects in Amazon data centers.
• Qualcomm will use more of AWS AI infrastructure including Amazon Bedrock, which be used for electronic design automation workloads.
• Amazon will get a warrant to buy 25 million Qualcomm shares at a price of $161.26 a share. The warrants vest as terms of the strategic partnership are met such as the purchase of Qualcomm server chips.

Qualcomm has been ramping its AI data center efforts in a bid to compete more with the likes of AMD and Nvidia. Arm is also entering the AI data center chip mix in what is a crowded space as inference scales.

Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, said the AWS deal combines "decades of leadership in advanced processing and power-efficient compute, to deliver breakthrough performance and enable the next generation of AI infrastructure."

Qualcomm previously announced its roadmap and a deal with Meta as well as the acquisition of Modular.

Qualcomm reported third quarter earnings of $2 billion, or $1.87 a share, on revenue of $9.95 billion, down 4% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.21 a share. The company said it executed well and managed through memory prices and tight supply. Qualcomm's non-GAAP earnings missed estimates by a penny a share.