Qualcomm and Amazon Web Services Ink Historic $60B AI Chip Deal, Boosting Stock
Qualcomm and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have unveiled a comprehensive, multi-generational partnership on September 8, 2026. This collaboration aims to co-develop custom artificial intelligence chips for data center infrastructure, a deal potentially worth up to $60 billion over the next decade. The announcement resulted in a more than 7% surge in Qualcomm’s shares.
The partnership will primarily concentrate on designing customized silicon for AI inference workloads, a rapidly expanding market for running trained AI models at scale. Additionally, it will focus on high-speed optical connectivity technologies, including solutions with a capacity of up to 1.6 terabits per second. As part of the agreement, Qualcomm has granted Amazon a warrant to purchase up to 25 million Qualcomm shares at $161.26 per share. This represents a stake valued at approximately $4 billion, with vesting tied to commercial milestones and purchases throughout the deal’s duration.
This partnership represents a significant strategic victory for Qualcomm as it actively broadens its reach beyond its smartphone chip origins. In June 2026, the company launched its Dragonfly C1000 data center CPU and aims to achieve $15 billion in data center chip revenue by fiscal 2029. Amazon now joins Microsoft and Meta as the hyperscalers supporting Qualcomm’s data center initiative. Revenue from the Amazon deal is projected to start in Qualcomm’s fiscal first quarter of 2027. Analysts have hailed the deal as a crucial endorsement of Qualcomm’s aspirations to challenge Nvidia’s supremacy in AI infrastructure.