While Qualcomm has been focusing on on-device AI, it believes in a hybrid AI future. The company announced at Computex the advanced custom CPU technology with NVIDIA’s full-stack AI platform, aimed at bringing efficient intelligence to data center infrastructure. With this, Qualcomm plans to re-enter the data center space, pursuing high performance and low power usage. The announcement amid growing demand for AI-optimized infrastructure reflects Qualcomm’s effort to diversify beyond mobile chips into enterprise computing.
Qualcomm President & CEO Cristiano R. Amon laid out the approach to extend its traction in edge data center computing into the Cloud data center segment. “With the ability to connect our custom processors to Nvidia’s rack-scale architecture, we’re advancing a shared vision of high-performance, energy-efficient computing to the data center,” said the CEO.
Partnership with NVIDIA will stimulate Qualcomm’s entry into the datacenter market as NVIDIA has the lion’s share across the AI server stack from hardware to software. “NVIDIA opening up NVLink is a prudent strategy to catalyze the ecosystem and gives a great opening for entrants such as Qualcomm to provide custom-semi datacenter compute solutions for hyperscalars and tier-2/3 datacenter players. This allows these Cloud providers and these semi-custom systems to plug into the NVIDIA ecosystem,” said Neil Shah, industry analyst & co-founder, Counterpoint Research.
The data centre CPU market is highly vying with AMD and Intel leading in the space. Furthermore, tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are already deploying their custom-built processors.
“Overall, a semi-custom approach would be a good starting strategy to scale on the datacenter side, making Qualcomm a complete edge to Cloud semiconductor solutions provider. I do expect some acquisitions in this regard moving forward,” Shah added.
The data center announcement at Computex isn’t a standalone development. A week before, Qualcomm and HUMAIN, a national AI champion advancing Saudi Arabia’s goals for AI, signed a memorandum of understanding to deliver advanced AI data centers, hybrid AI across edge and Cloud, along with Cloud-to-edge services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and beyond. The strategic collaboration will foster the development of cutting-edge AI and CPU solutions for data centers by Qualcomm for use in HUMAIN AI cloud infrastructure.
Qualcomm entered the data center market in 2017 with its famously developed Centriq data center CPUs. However, the attempt failed, and the project was later cancelled. Moving on, the company purchased the startup Nuvia, which was designing Arm-based data center CPUs, and this acquisition powered Qualcomm’s re-entry into the sector. Today, Qualcomm has the widest portfolio from connectivity to compute and access to thousands of developers and partnerships, which can scale well into the data center market.
