Qualcomm’s stock pop shows investors are ‘waking up’ to boom in AI devices

Qualcomm shares surged 12% on Friday and are now up 75% in the past month, as the chipmaker’s increasingly central position in the physical AI boom becomes more apparent to Wall Street. The stock is trading at a record.

Although Qualcomm has fallen behind giants like Nvidia in the race for chips to power AI models and workloads, the company is using its dominance in smartphones to cement its role as a key player in connected devices, whether it’s eyeglasses, cars or robots.

OpenAI is also reportedly partnering with Qualcomm to develop an AI chip that could power a coming device run by AI agents.

“This company will be back in its former glory and will lead the connected device revolution,” said Ivan Feinseth, an analyst at Tigress Financial Partners who rates Qualcomm a buy. Investors are “waking up to this fact,” he said.

Regarding Qualcomm’s work with OpenAI, Feinseth said he’s bullish about the forthcoming device, calling it a “phone that will be an AI-based operating system that will do everything.”

Qualcomm is core to a plethora of gadgets doing AI at the so-called edge, instead of in the cloud. That includes Microsoft’s Surface PCs and smartglasses from Google and Meta. Its Arm-based chips offer an energy-efficient alternative to those made by central processor leaders Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

On Thursday, Qualcomm announced a deal with automaker Stellantis, which said it will use the chipmaker’s Snapdragon processors to “support advanced, unified compute power across the entire vehicle, including cockpit, connectivity and advanced driver assist systems.”

Stellantis owns a broad portfolio of brands, including Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep and Maserati.

“Customers will be able to enjoy a smooth, immersive, and safe auto-drive experience on city and highway roads, with multiple driving modes to choose from,” said Ned Curic, Stellantis’ head of product development, at the company’s investor day on Thursday.

Qualcomm has struck similar deals with Bosch, Volkswagen, Hyundai and BMW. In its most recent earnings report, Qualcomm said revenue in its automotive business climbed 38% from a year earlier to $1.3 billion. More than 1 million cars already operate their autonomous systems on Qualcomm processors, according to the company.

Friday’s stock pop is also tied to investor excitement around an entirely new business segment for Qualcomm: data center chips.

Announced last year, Qualcomm’s coming AI200 and AI250 are custom AI accelerators — a more programmable type of chip than Nvidia’s graphics processing units that have dominated AI workloads thus far. The chips are supposed to go on sale later this year, available in a full rack-scale system similar to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and AMD’s coming Helios system.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on the company’s earnings call in April that it would begin shipping data center chips to “a large hyperscaler” within the calendar year. Investors could hear more when Amon delivers a keynote address at the Computex conference in Taiwan on June 2, and at Qualcomm’s investor day on June 24.

—CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report

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