Qualcomm targets $15 billion data center chip sales by 2029

Qualcomm said it expects its data-center chip business to generate more than $15 billion in annual sales by fiscal 2029, a target that sent its shares up more than 12% in after-hours trading and put the San Diego company’s AI ambitions under a harder spotlight. The forecast is the clearest sign yet that Qualcomm wants to move beyond smartphones and become a real supplier inside AI infrastructure, not just a handset chipmaker.

Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala told investors the data-center line should bring in about $5 billion in fiscal 2027, including $1 billion from new custom-chip customers. Qualcomm also raised its fiscal 2029 non-handset revenue target to $40 billion from $22 billion, with handsets expected to account for only about a third of chip sales by then. That would mark a steep reset for a company long tied to mobile phones, where growth has slowed and more business has shifted in-house at Apple and Samsung.

The company is backing the plan with a new Dragonfly portfolio built for what it calls the “agentic AI era.” Qualcomm’s materials name three products: the Dragonfly C1000 CPU, High Bandwidth Compute, or HBC, and the Dragonfly AI300 inference accelerator. Qualcomm says the lineup is aimed at lower total cost of ownership through better performance per watt and higher token throughput, a pitch designed to appeal to cloud buyers looking for cheaper alternatives to Nvidia-style systems.

Qualcomm also said Meta is its first named customer for the data-center chips and that it has a multi-generation agreement with Meta for data-center CPUs. Microsoft and Meta Platforms will use Qualcomm’s new AI chips, and the company is building custom chips for two other unnamed hyperscale customers. That customer list matters because the path from investor enthusiasm to meaningful sales depends on whether Qualcomm can turn one marquee deal into a repeatable business with large cloud operators.

The company sharpened that bet further by announcing a planned acquisition of AI software startup Modular on June 24, 2026, signaling that Qualcomm wants software support alongside silicon. It also widened the diversification push outside data centers, lifting its automotive design-win pipeline to $65 billion and its automotive revenue target to $10 billion by fiscal 2029. Mark Zuckerberg framed Meta’s partnership around building infrastructure for “personal superintelligence,” giving Qualcomm a visible endorsement in a market still dominated by Nvidia and contested by AMD, Broadcom and in-house hyperscaler chips.