systems

Oh, Snap(dragon): DC chief says the mobile-chip giant sees bit barns as its next growth market

We knew it was coming, but now it's official: Qualcomm is making a major push into the datacenter market. And though it is late to the game, the mobile-chip giant believes it can make an impact by delivering a lower total cost of ownership and better performance per watt than rival platforms.

It has to go somewhere, and the company is already dominating the chip space elsewhere, Qualcomm's datacenter EVP and GM Tony Pialis said during the company’s Investor Day presentation on Wednesday. Pialis said that Qualcomm is already a winner in mobile, PC, and automotive, but will now be able to play in a market with well established competitors such as Nvidia. He started by addressing the obvious question of "are you too late" to the market.

"When the company turns its attention to solve a new problem, we revolutionize the solution and push our way to the forefront," he said. "And folks I'm here to tell you today that is what we will and are doing in datacenter."

Pialis’ portion of the presentation included the formal unveiling of the Dragonfly compute platform we’ve been hearing about for weeks, the … ahem … core of which is the C1000 CPU he showed off. Pialis claimed that the new datacenter-grade chips offer 2x better performance per watt and 30 percent more speed than competitors' processors. 

The CPU cores, Pialis explained, are based on Qualcomm's custom Oryon architecture and will operate at more than 5 GHz in a chiplet-based design featuring more than 250 cores. Most interestingly, Pialis argued that the design of the C1000 chips addresses the memory bottleneck facing AI datacenters with what Qualcomm is calling "High-Bandwidth Compute" (HBC) technology. Pialis described HBC as combining compute and memory more closely by integrating an XPU beneath a DRAM stack, claiming it delivers SRAM-like performance advantages inside a high-bandwidth memory package while reducing data movement and improving performance per watt.

Those Dragonfly C1000 processors are expected to enter production in the second half of 2028. Qualcomm plans to offer multiple C1000 variants targeting agentic AI, general-purpose computing, and AI head-node workloads.

But CPUs alone do not a datacenter pivot make, and Pialis said that there are three other datacenter segments Qualcomm is targeting along with new CPUs: connectivity, custom silicon designed for individual customers, and AI accelerators. 

There are also the aforementioned AI accelerators, which Qualcomm says will use its HBC technology to address memory bottlenecks in AI workloads. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made guest appearances during Investor Day. Qualcomm said Microsoft plans to use its HBC-based AI accelerators, while Meta separately announced plans to deploy Dragonfly C1000 CPUs under a multi-generation agreement. Pialis also detailed new connectivity technologies that form part of the Dragonfly portfolio.

According to Pialis, Qualcomm wants to enable new distances in cluster-to-cluster optical connectivity up to 20 kilometers with its new QAM16 coherent-lite optical modules.

“We have everything you need to scale from millimeter technology to tens of kilometers,” Pialis said. 

As for custom silicon, that’ll involve making bespoke chips for what Pialis said will be Qualcomm’s “highest tier of customer” who needs someone to design and fabricate AI and cloud DC CPUs from end to end. 

What Qualcomm is bringing on the hardware side will be supplemented by Modular, a company that develops AI software stacks. Qualcomm announced on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement to acquire Modular in order to flesh out the software side of its Dragonfly endeavors, which the company said will give it access to hundreds of billions in new market space. ®