Qualcomm Stock Spikes More than 20% as Company Enters AI Chip Race, Taking on NVIDIA, AMD
Shares of Qualcomm (Qcom) rose more than 20% Monday as the company announced its move into the data center with the launch of its new AI200 and AI250 chips and rack-scale server offerings.
The move puts Qualcomm in direct competition with the likes of NVIDIA (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), as the company seeks to stake its claim in the multibillion-dollar data center market.
Available starting in 2026, AI200 is both the name of Qualcomm’s AI accelerator and full server AI250 is the next generation AI accelerator and server coming in 2027. The third Chip is scheduled for 2028.
QUALCOMM says it will follow this year’s snow moving forward.
The company said its AI200 and AI250 chips take advantage of its hexagonal NPU, or neural processing unit. The company released NPUS on Windows PCs and is taking lessons from those processors and running them into the data center.
Qualcomm also touts their total cost of ownership as a key advantage, due to their low power consumption. The chips, the company explains, are designed specifically for AI detection, or the process of using AI models. In other words, customers will not use them to train new ai models.
Learn more about Qualcomm’s stock movement and today’s market action.
Total cost of ownership has become a major metric for data center builders, as they try to contain the costs involved in building and operating their large farms.
The main difference between the AI200 and the AI250, Qualcomm explained, is that the AI250 will offer 10x the memory bandwidth of the AI200.
Customers won’t want to buy Qualcomm servers to access the company’s chips. According to Durga Malladi, Senior Vice President and GM of technology planning, age solutions, and data centers at Qualcomm, they will be able to choose individual chips, parts of the company’s server offerings, or set it all up.
And those customers, Malladi said, could include the likes of Nvidia and AMD, making the companies both rivals and potential partners.
This is not Qualcomm’s first foray into the data center market. In 2017, the company announced that it was building the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 platform for Microsoft (MSFT), but the project quickly fell apart due to tough competition from Intel and AMD and broader problems affecting the company’s focus.
QUALCOMM is also currently offering its own AI 100 Ultra card, although it is made as a draw card with Off Servs. The AI200 and AI250 are designed to live in dedicated AI applications.
