Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon delivers a keynote speech at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 1, 2026. Ann Wang | ReutersQualcomm shares rose 3% on Tuesday after the company announced a data center infrastructure partnership with Amazon Web Services, a big win as the chipmaker tries to compete with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence market. Initially, shares rose about 10%. According to a press release, Qualcomm is working with Amazon “across multiple generations of custom silicon” to help build AWS’s AI infrastructure, specifically focused on inference. Financial terms were not disclosed. “As AI workloads grow exponentially, driving unprecedented demand for compute, storage, networking and memory bandwidth, and energy-efficient infrastructure, the collaboration brings together Amazon’s comprehensive, secure, and cost-effective AI infrastructure with Qualcomm Technologies’ leadership in energy-efficient processing, silicon design, and system-level integration,” the statement said. Qualcomm is known for making processors that power smartphones and other mobile devices. But the company made a splash in June when it revealed a central processing unit for data centers called the Dragonfly C1000, and said Meta would use it when it begins production in 2028. The chipmaker said the new CPU was built for agent AI and focuses on delivering computing performance without using too much power. Qualcomm said at the time that it is targeting $15 billion in data center sales in fiscal 2029, and outlined a roadmap to go after the market with several different products, including an artificial intelligence chip and a product that will bring together several chips. By partnering with AWS, Qualcomm is receiving a sign of trust from another hyperscaler. Like Meta, Amazon’s annual capital expenditures on AI infrastructure are reaching hundreds of billions of dollars. Nvidia has become the most valuable company in the world by dominating the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), which are necessary to build sophisticated AI models and run the heaviest workloads. But more and more chipmakers are getting involved in the AI boom now that the CPU is proving to be key to AI. While GPUs are ideal for training and running AI models because they have thousands of tiny cores specifically focused on performing many operations simultaneously, CPUs have a smaller number of powerful cores that execute general-purpose sequential tasks. Bank of America predicts the CPU market could more than double, from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are seeing growing demand for CPUs for their data centers, and in March Nvidia offered new details about its agent-optimized CPUs. Dion Harris, head of AI infrastructure at Nvidia, told CNBC at the time that “CPUs are becoming the bottleneck in terms of the growth of this AI and agent workflow.” CNBC’s Katie Tarasov contributed to this report. WATCH: Qualcomm partners with AWSChoose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.
