en.Wedoany.com Reported - Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Nikkei Asia that the company plans to launch its full four-direction data center product line under the Dragonfly brand in the Chinese market, including dedicated AI accelerators designed to stay within U.S. export control thresholds. The announcement was made during Qualcomm's Investor Day in New York. In 2025, China accounted for 46% of Qualcomm's revenue, almost entirely from smartphone chip supply. The strategy to enter the Chinese data center market may repeat a scenario that previously led to a sharp decline in Nvidia's accelerator sales in China to nearly zero.
The Dragonfly series includes AI accelerators, data center processors (CPUs), custom chips, and communication chips. Amon stated that versions of all product lines will be supplied to China strictly in compliance with export regulations. He told Nikkei Asia that the company has versions of all products that meet these guidelines, adding that Qualcomm is in negotiations with Chinese customers. The first accelerator, the AI250, will launch next year. It features a high-bandwidth cache (HBC) architecture that places memory close to the processor, unlike the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks relied upon by competitors Nvidia and AMD solutions. In a market where HBM supply remains constrained for the foreseeable future, this packaging technology choice could become an advantage.
Qualcomm told investors that its data center division should achieve $300 million in profit this fiscal year, reaching $5 billion by fiscal 2027. Qualcomm described these metrics as the initial phase of growth within a total addressable market expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2029. Success in China hinges on Amon's argument that Qualcomm's existing relationships with Chinese smartphone and automotive manufacturers can extend into the data center space. The same customer base also supported the AI200 and AI250 accelerators launched last October.
Currently, China is not a neutral buyer for Qualcomm. Last October, Chinese regulators began an antitrust investigation into Qualcomm's acquisition of Autotalks. Additionally, Chinese authorities have called for local data center operators to source at least 50% of their chip purchases from domestic manufacturers, guiding companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent to adopt components from Huawei and Cambricon. These market trends have already weakened the export-oriented solution model Qualcomm is attempting to replicate. For example, Nvidia's H20 chip, designed specifically for the Chinese market, generated only about $50 million in revenue for the company by the end of last year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that Nvidia's market share in China has dropped to "zero." Qualcomm is voluntarily entering this segment, with its hardware not expected to begin customer deliveries until fiscal 2027. By then, production of Huawei's Ascend series and Cambricon accelerators is expected to far exceed current levels.
Outside of China, Qualcomm has at least one confirmed buyer: Saudi Arabia's Humain has received the AI100 system and committed to deploying 200 megawatts of Qualcomm racks. Domestically in China, despite Beijing's efforts to reduce reliance on foreign chips, Qualcomm still needs to convince customers of the rationale for using foreign chips.
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