Qualcomm (QCOM.US) CEO predicts "AI intelligent bodies will replace Apps": 40 AI terminals on the way, edge cloud AI "selling shovels" logic emerges.

For a long time, the semiconductor giant Qualcomm (QCOM.US), which has been focusing on smartphone chips, is now developing over 40 new AI smart terminal designs. The company's CEO, Cristiano Amon, recently emphasized in a media interview that this chip design giant is preparing for the upcoming wave of "AI smart body" super wave in the consumer electronics application terminal field. Recent productivity data reports have been proving that companies are increasingly viewing cutting-edge AI technologies such as agent-efficient intelligent work flows and AI smart bodies as "strongly reducing costs and increasing efficiency capital expenditures", reinforcing the judgment that "enterprise AI investment is still in its early stages, and there is still a long and snowy slope for AI applications and computational infrastructure needs", and also supporting the continued soaring valuations of Anthropic/OpenAI and Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and cloud computing super giants such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA Corporation, AMD, and Micron, the leaders in the AI computing industry chain, with their stock prices showing a strong bullish trend. Enterprises have an urgent need to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs, and in recent times, they have made great strides in promoting the widespread application of two core categories of AI applications - generative AI applications and AI smart bodies. Among them, AI smart bodies (AI agents) that autonomously perform various tedious and complex tasks are likely to be the ultimate trend in AI applications in the next decade. The emergence of AI smart bodies means that artificial intelligence is beginning to evolve from an information-assisting tool to a highly intelligent productivity tool, which is also why the valuation of Anthropic can break through 1 trillion dollars and surpass OpenAI. The latest research by MarketsandMarkets shows that the market size of AI smart bodies is expected to reach $53 billion by 2030, indicating an annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of up to 46% starting from 2025. The recent strong performance of Qualcomm's stock price is no longer just based on the logic of "smartphone chip cycles reaching the bottom". Instead, the market has begun to reprice its potential core position in the two key investment lines of AI computing - data center CPUs/self-developed AI inference chips and edge AI smart body devices. By the end of Monday's U.S. market close, Qualcomm's stock price had risen as much as 75% since April, with a market value hovering around $233 billion, clearly indicating that the market has significantly begun to give it a strong premium positioning as a "new force in AI computing infrastructure", rather than just a traditional smartphone SoC chip company valuation. 40 AI terminal devices are on the way! Qualcomm is betting on the AI smart body super wave reshaping the consumer electronics interaction mode In a wide-ranging interview on CNBC's "The Tech Download" podcast, Amon outlined his latest views on the changing role of smartphones and app applications, and why AI smart glasses may become the next important consumer electronics device and how Qualcomm will enter the market with new electronic products, and how chip design architecture will need to change to adapt to smaller terminal applications. Amon's latest comments also hint at new entrants in the consumer electronics market, which may affect how global major smartphone manufacturers like Apple Inc. and Samsung compete in the way AI technology spreads to various terminal devices. "I think there will be a lot of developmental experiments with different form factors," Amon said on "The Tech Download." "Right now, we have over 40 of these AI device designs, and I can tell you that the types of form factors are very, very diverse." Amon said these wearable consumer electronic devices include jewelry, earbuds with cameras, lapel pins, and watches. "The principle is something you wear, something that is always with you, something that can see the world around you, so you have context, and you have access to an AI smart body and the ability to interact with these smart bodies," Amon said. AI smart bodies are seen as the next focus area for digital AI assistants such as Apple Inc.'s Siri or Alphabet Inc.'s Class C Gemini. The tech industry is unanimous in betting that these smart bodies will be able to carry out longer and more complex tasks across various applications and services on devices, such as pre-booking and a range of holiday-related services basics, or automating web crawling processes. Amon shared an example of a smart body: it can instantly retrieve details of bank transactions, thus eliminating the redundant need for users to navigate through apps and manually search for information. This could mean that in the future when smart bodies perform tasks, the way we interact with smartphone apps will change. "Apps are not dead," Amon said, "but they will change completely." "These smart bodies will become new application platforms," he added. The unstoppable trend of AI smart bodies permeation and popularization, as well as the nature of how we will use applications in the future, may also change the long-term interaction between people and smartphones and create opportunities for the popularity of new types of terminal consumer electronics devices. AI smart bodies may replace smartphones as the center of digital life. "Smartphones revolve around smart bodies. The new category of consumer electronic devices... will also revolve around smart bodies. Smart bodies will be the key role in understanding human intent and doing things for you, so the focus is shifting," Amon said, adding that smartphones will not disappear entirely. The Qualcomm CEO particularly favors smart glasses as a product category, which may soon rival smartphones in size. He said in an interview that the annual shipments of smart glasses are currently in the "tens of millions." Amon stated, "In a few years," this number could reach "hundreds of millions of pairs of AI smart glasses, almost equal in size to the smartphone market". According to Counterpoint Research's statistics, smartphone shipments in 2025 were 1.26 billion units, an increase of only about 3% from the previous year. From Meta to Samsung, major global tech giants are developing AI smart glasses with built-in cameras and AI large models. Amon said that the shift in device landscape may open the door for major new AI application development leaders to enter the consumer hardware market. Last year, OpenAI acquired the hardware startup io founded by iconic Apple Inc. product designer Johnny Ive, aimed at integrating AI technology and ultimately entering the consumer electronics terminal device market. "All the devices we wear could eventually become terminals for smart bodies, and those AI application development companies understand that they must win these smart body terminals," Amon said in explaining why non-traditional hardware companies are entering the field of small consumer electronics tools. Another core reason for newcomers entering the hardware field is data. Amon said these devices will collect data on a scale "exponentially larger" than the data used to train AI models by developers such as OpenAI. "So these companies want this data because it is important for training future large models," and it helps to create a "customized" AI smart body experience for users, Amon said. As devices may shift towards smaller form factors, the core AI chips powering them also need to change, as they need to become more powerful in overall performance and further increase energy efficiency. "Our entire roadmap is currently undergoing upgrades. The entire roadmap is because I believe that none of the devices we have today are ready for the future integration of AI into everything," Amon said. Data center CPUs, AI inference chips, and edge AI smart body wearable devices, together ignite Qualcomm's new round of super growth trajectory Data center CPUs are on the verge of disruption, coupled with the forthcoming AI inference chips, and under the trend of "AI integrating everything", edge AI smart body devices are set to emerge in full force. The veteran smartphone chip king Qualcomm is rekindling market valuation imagination, heading towards a new super-strong valuation and fundamental growth trajectory, which is why Qualcomm's stock price has skyrocketed since April. The recent strong performance of Qualcomm's stock price is no longer just based on the logic of "smartphone chip cycles reaching the bottom". Instead, the market has begun to reprice its potential core position in the two key investment lines of AI computing - data center CPUs/self-developed AI inference chips and edge AI smart body devices. At the data center level, the latest outlook for Qualcomm's fundamental growth prospects is that it is accelerating from being a "mobile chip company" to becoming a "low-power, high-energy-efficient AI inference and data center high-performance CPU comprehensive orchestration platform". The company has released the AI200 and AI250 data center AI inference platforms, with commercialization/large-scale production pointed towards the end of 2026 and the beginning of 2027, emphasizing rack-level inference, energy efficiency, and total cost of ownership as core competitive points. Qualcomm recently also showcased the AI200 rack-level system, integrating AI inference accelerator core chips, HBM/DRAM memory/NAND storage components, optical interconnect systems, and management software into a deployable data center super infrastructure platform. More importantly, AI smart body workloads do not rely solely on GPU training. Subsequent large-scale inference, scheduling, tool calling, retrieval, context management, and multi-device orchestration require high-performance data center CPUs and even some low-power NPUs to work together. Therefore, the "data center CPU demand explosion" can be seen as an important variable for Qualcomm's reevaluation by the market. Against the background of the explosion in demand for data center CPUs, the two x86 architecture CPU supergiants - Intel Corporation (INTC.US) and AMD (AMD.US) - have seen their stock prices skyrocket by over 150% recently and continue to set new historical highs. At the same time, Qualcomm (QCOM.US), which has returned to the data center CPU market, has seen its stock price surge by 60% since April, highlighting investors' increasing bullish sentiment on the "critical bottleneck" of AI computing. The well-known investment research firm GF Securities recently issued a research report stating that "data center server CPUs are experiencing a super cycle", and AMD (AMD.US), Intel Corporation (INTC.US), and Qualcomm (QCOM.US) may become the main beneficiaries. The latest technological developments in data center CPUs and AI chips at Qualcomm show that it is strategically expanding from just a mobile SoC chip design company to a supplier of data center AI infrastructure. Qualcomm has announced its re-entry into the data center CPU market, which is a significant departure from its previous focus solely on mobile SoC areas. The company has confirmed that it is developing custom data center CPUs and plans for these CPUs to work in conjunction with NVIDIA Corporation's AI GPU accelerators (such as NVLink Fusion interconnect) to meet the requirements of future AI servers. It is worth noting that in the mid-2010s, it had previously launched the ARM-based Centriq 2400 server processor, which had a high core count and was geared towards cloud computing and high-throughput workloads, indicating that it has some experience in data center CPU design. In terms of data center AI accelerators, Qualcomm has launched a product line for large-scale AI inference - the AI200 and AI250 accelerators. These high-performance AI chips are specifically designed for data center AI inference workloads and are planned to be commercialized in 2026 and 2027, marking Qualcomm's attempt to establish an AI chip product line that works in conjunction with CPUs to be effective in new workloads such as AI inference and agentic AI (AI smart bodies). These are based on Qualcomm's exclusive Hexagon NPU architecture, optimized for memory capacity and energy efficiency, and can be configured as data center rack-scale solutions, indicating that Qualcomm is catching up with NVIDIA Corporation and AMD in the deployment capabilities of large AI computing infrastructure, while also striving to create a low total cost of ownership AI inference platform. On the edge AI front, Amon's judgment that "AI smart bodies will become the new apps" is essentially rebuilding Qualcomm's long-term market space: in the future, smartphones, PCs, smart glasses, earphones, watches, lapel pins, car cabins, and other wearable devices may all become super terminals for AI smart bodies, instead of just running traditional app applications on consumer electronics devices. Qualcomm's CEO recently said at Computex that 2026 is the "year of the smart body," where AI smart bodies will change human-machine interactions across smartphones, PCs, cars, and wearable devices, transforming devices from digital life centers into endpoints for smart bodies. This is highly consistent with his recent statement about having "over 40 AI terminal device designs": if smart bodies do indeed replace apps as the core entry point for user interaction, Qualcomm's value will not only be in selling chips, but in mastering the underlying comprehensive platform capabilities of edge perception, low-power AI inference platform, device connectivity, cameras/audio sensors, secure execution environment, and multi-device collaboration. If you have reached this point, you have reached the end of the translation. Let me know if you have any other questions or need further assistance.