Qualcomm

Qualcomm designs mobile SoCs, edge AI chips, and automotive silicon, bringing AI inference to devices outside the data center. AI PC and automotive segments growing rapidly; recent push into data-center AI with Cloud AI 100. Strong patent portfolio.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms enable on-device AI across billions of smartphones and emerging edge endpoints.

qualcomm.com Networking & Custom SiliconUSApublic · QCOM

At a glance

Total raised

$68M

last round ipo

Headcount

—

no public estimate on record

Headquarters

San Diego

USA

Founded

1985

41 years active

Status

Public

Ticker · QCOM

Patents on file

500

USPTO grants

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Funding history

Total raised

$68M

Rounds tracked

Latest stage

IPO

Date	Stage	Amount	Valuation	Lead investors
Dec 13, 1991	IPO	$68M	—	—

Stock performance

Latest earnings

Q2 2026Filed Apr 29, 2026

Revenue$10.6B

YoY-3%

GAAP EPS$6.88

Qualcomm reported Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue of $10.6 billion, down 3% year-over-year. GAAP net income was $7.37 billion (+162%) and GAAP diluted EPS was $6.88 (+173%), both heavily inflated by a $5.7 billion income-tax benefit from releasing a valuation allowance on federal deferred-tax assets. On an adjusted basis, non-GAAP EPS was $2.65 (-7% YoY). QCT segment revenue was $9.1 billion (-4%), with handset revenue declining 13% to $6.0 billion. Automotive posted record quarterly revenue of $1.33 billion (+38%), IoT revenue was $1.73 billion (+9%), and combined automotive and IoT grew 20% YoY. QTL licensing revenue was $1.38 billion (+5%). The company returned $3.7 billion to stockholders in the quarter via dividends and buybacks, and announced a new $20 billion share-repurchase authorization. For Q3 fiscal 2026, Qualcomm guided revenue of $9.2–$10.0 billion and GAAP diluted EPS of $1.26–$1.46. Management expects QCT handset revenue from Chinese customers to bottom in Q3 and return to sequential growth the following quarter. The CEO highlighted entry into data center with a hyperscaler custom-silicon engagement on track for initial shipments later this calendar year.

Guidance

Q3 FY26 revenue $9.2B-$10.0B, GAAP EPS $1.26-$1.46

Read the 8-K

How they make money

Hardware + recurring servicesPattern

Gross margin53.8%

Operating margin21.8%

Q2 2026 · 8-K →

Qualcomm generates revenue through a dual model: selling semiconductor chips (hardware) and licensing its patent portfolio (recurring IP royalties). Its QCT segment sells Snapdragon mobile SoCs, automotive silicon, edge AI chips, and data-center inference accelerators to OEMs and device manufacturers, with revenue recognized at shipment. Its QTL segment licenses Qualcomm's extensive wireless and multimedia patent portfolio to hundreds of licensees worldwide, collecting royalties calculated as a percentage of each licensed device's net selling price — a recurring model that scales with global device volume. The chip business carries typical semiconductor gross margins (industry pattern of 50–60% at scale) and benefits from wafer-cost declines as manufacturing nodes mature. The licensing segment has very high incremental margins because it requires no incremental cost of goods sold — royalties are pure IP monetization. Qualcomm effectively subsidizes its R&D pipeline through the chip business while the licensing business monetizes that same R&D across the entire addressable device market, creating a structural margin advantage versus pure-play chip designers.

Generated by deepseek-v4-flash · June 2, 2026Analytical summary · not investment advice

Founder backgrounds

Irwin Jacobs

Co-founder (former Chairman & CEO, retired)

Earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University and S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. Was an assistant and associate professor of EE at MIT from 1959 to 1966, co-authoring the textbook 'Principles of Communication Engineering' with John Wozencraft. Later served as professor at UC San Diego. Co-founded Linkabit Corporation in 1968 with Andrew Viterbi, producing satellite communication systems and the VideoCipher satellite TV system. Co-founded Qualcomm in 1985 with Viterbi and five others, championing CDMA technology for cellular networks against significant industry resistance. CDMA became foundational to 2G and 3G standards. Served as Chairman and CEO of Qualcomm until his retirement in 2009.

Andrew Viterbi

Co-founder (former Vice Chairman & CTO, retired)

Born in Bergamo, Italy, and emigrated to the U.S. before World War II. Earned a B.S. and M.S. from MIT and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from USC in 1962. Developed the Viterbi algorithm in 1967 while at UCLA — a decoding method now used in all four international standards for digital cellular phones, satellite broadcast, and deep-space telemetry. Co-founded Linkabit with Irwin Jacobs in 1968 and Qualcomm with Jacobs and others in 1985. Served as Vice Chairman and CTO. USC named its engineering school the Viterbi School of Engineering in his honor following a $52 million gift. Won the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2016.

AI bull / bear

Bull case

Qualcomm owns the on-device AI bottleneck: the smartphone SoC. With Snapdragon platforms powering billions of phones, every AI feature moving to the edge — from live translation to camera intelligence — runs through Qualcomm's silicon. That installed base is a moat no rival can quickly replicate. The Snapdragon C platform proves Qualcomm is extending that dominance into PCs, targeting the $300-and-up Arm laptop segment where Intel has no answer on power efficiency. As DRAM costs squeeze the sub-$500 market, Qualcomm's integrated design approach gives OEMs a cost structure that keeps budget PCs viable, precisely when affordability is most valued. Automotive is a second flywheel: Snapdragon Ride and Digital Chassis lock in multi-year design wins before competitors finish their roadmaps. Add a fortress patent portfolio that generates steady licensing revenue regardless of chip sales, and Qualcomm has diversified revenue streams that buffer against any single market downturn while positioning it to capture the next billion AI endpoints in cars, laptops, and smart devices.

Bear case

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm exclusivity has expired, and Nvidia is already moving in. The RTX Spark superchip — combining a 20-core Grace Arm CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU — threatens to leapfrog Qualcomm's Snapdragon X lineup exactly when the PC transition to Arm should have been Qualcomm's to lose. If Nvidia captures the premium Arm PC segment, Qualcomm gets pushed to the budget aisle, where analysts warn the sub-$500 laptop market may disappear entirely before 2028 due to rising DRAM costs. The Snapdragon C's $300 price floor doesn't help if the category evaporates. In data center AI, the Cloud AI 100 remains a footnote against Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem. And Qualcomm's licensing model faces perpetual regulatory and customer pushback — Apple is building its own modems, and handset makers are increasingly designing their own silicon. The smartphone crown is secure today, but the highest-growth markets (AI training, premium PCs) are the ones where Qualcomm is chasing rather than leading.

Generated by deepseek-v4-flash · June 2, 2026Refreshes quarterly · see disclosures

In the news

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Leadership

Irwin Jacobs

Co-founder (former Chairman & CEO, retired)

—

Andrew Viterbi

Co-founder (former Vice Chairman & CTO, retired)

—

Franklin Antonio

Co-founder

—

Adelia Coffman

Co-founder

—

Andrew Cohen

Co-founder

—

Klein Gilhousen

Co-founder

—

Harvey White

Co-founder

—

Cristiano Amon

President & CEO

in 𝕏

Akash Palkhiwala

Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer

—

Baaziz Achour

Chief Technology Officer

—

Alex Rogers

President, Qualcomm Technology Licensing & Global Affairs

—

Ann Chaplin

General Counsel & Corporate Secretary

—

Products

Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform
Qualcomm's flagship Android smartphone SoC, built on a 3nm process with second-generation custom Oryon CPU cores reaching 4.32 GHz. Its upgraded Hexagon NPU and Qualcomm AI Engine run large generative-AI and agentic models on-device, while the Adreno GPU and Snapdragon ISP drive high-end gaming and computational photography. The later Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 extends the line with third-gen Oryon cores and roughly 20% higher CPU performance.
Snapdragon X Elite / X2 Elite
Arm-based SoC family for Windows AI PCs that brought Qualcomm into laptops to challenge Intel and AMD. The X Elite pairs custom Oryon CPU cores with an integrated 45-TOPS Hexagon NPU for on-device AI; the late-2025 X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme scale up to 18 Oryon cores and an 80-TOPS NPU, emphasizing battery life and local LLM inference for Copilot+ class machines.
Snapdragon Digital Chassis (Automotive)
An open, scalable automotive platform spanning telematics, connectivity, the digital cockpit, and Snapdragon Ride ADAS/autonomous-driving compute. Built on Qualcomm's mobile silicon heritage, it lets automakers consolidate infotainment, driver assistance, and cloud services onto common SoCs. The platform underpins a multibillion-dollar automotive design-win pipeline and is a central pillar of Qualcomm's diversification beyond smartphones.
Cloud AI 100 Ultra
Qualcomm's data-center AI inference accelerator, designed for high performance-per-watt rather than training. The Ultra variant targets generative-AI and large-language-model inference, with large on-card memory to host sizable models and a power envelope aimed at efficient rack deployments. It marks Qualcomm's push to extend its low-power inference expertise from edge devices into the data center.

Most recent patents

500 patents on file, but none with both an extractable figure and an abstract on Google Patents yet.

Qualcomm

At a glance

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Funding history

Stock performance

Latest earnings

How they make money

Founder backgrounds

Irwin Jacobs

Andrew Viterbi

AI bull / bear

In the news

Nvidia's RTX Spark could caplitalize where Qualcomm's Arm-based efforts have not — following the expiration of Qualcomm's Windows on Arm deal, Nvidia stands poised to pick up the slack

Qualcomm aims Snapdragon C laptop chip at the budget laptop segment, as manufacturers feel the DRAM squeeze — analysts warn sub $500 laptop market may disappear before 2028

We went hands-on with Qualcomm's new '$300 and up' ARM laptop platform with mystery eight-core CPU — active-cooled Snapdragon C laptop surfaces in Acer Aspire Go 15

Watch

Leadership

Products

Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform

Snapdragon X Elite / X2 Elite

Snapdragon Digital Chassis (Automotive)

Cloud AI 100 Ultra

Most recent patents

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