Catenaa, Monday, October 27, 2025- Qualcomm stock rose by 18% on Monday after it announced the release of new AI accelerator chips, marking new competition for Nvidia and AMD.
The AI chips are a shift from Qualcomm, which has thus far focused on semiconductors for wireless connectivity and mobile devices, not massive data centers.
Qualcomm said that both the AI200, which will go on sale in 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, can come in a system that fills up a full, liquid-cooled server rack.
Qualcomm is matching Nvidia and AMD, which offer their graphics processing units, or GPUs, in full-rack systems that allow as many as 72 chips to act as one computer. AI labs need that computing power to run the most advanced models.
Qualcomm stock was up by 15% on Monday morning; the stock is up by 29% so far this year.
Qualcomm’s data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm’s smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs.
“We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.
The entry of Qualcomm into the data center world marks new competition in the fastest-growing market in technology: equipment for new AI-focused server farms.
Nearly $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures will be spent on data centers through 2030, with the majority going to systems based around AI chips, according to a McKinsey estimate.
The industry has been dominated by Nvidia, whose GPUs have over 90% of the market so far, and sales of which have driven the company to a market cap of over $4.5 trillion. Nvidia’s chips were used to train OpenAI’s GPTs, the large language models used in ChatGPT.
But companies such as OpenAI have been looking for alternatives, and earlier this month the startup announced plans to buy chips from the second-place GPU maker, AMD, and potentially take a stake in the company.
