Qualcomm is reportedly in advanced talks with an undisclosed hyperscaler regarding the development of ARM-based data center chips.
Qualcomm is in advanced talks with a hyperscaler that wants to integrate the company’s ARM-based chips into the data center. The company itself states this. During Computex this year, Qualcomm already announced its plans to build data center chips.
General and AI CPU
Qualcomm is currently developing a custom CPU for the cloud. The company has waited long enough for other players to introduce ARM into the data center. Think primarily of AWS’s Graviton. As a result, there are already many ARM-optimized workloads running in the cloud, which Qualcomm is now targeting.
The ambition goes further. Qualcomm must also dance to the tune of the ubiquitous AI hype and integrate AI into its plans. This takes the form of a CPU in development tailored for AI inference clusters. Such an efficient CPU would be optimized to drive accelerators. These accelerators and even entire racks are also planned.
Late
Qualcomm has recently acquired Alphawave Semi. The expertise of that company is now being combined with previously developed designs for the Orion CPU and Hexagon NPU. From there, new chips will emerge.
Qualcomm is not the only ARM specialist looking to capitalize on the data center market. You could even say that the mobile chip specialist is late to the game. Hyperscalers have already built ARM-based chips themselves, and even Arm itself wants to enter the competitive fray.
We still don’t know which hyperscaler Qualcomm wants to partner with or the scale of the collaboration.