Qualcomm is launching a pair of new AI chips in an attempt to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the market. On Monday, Qualcomm announced plans to release its new AI200 chip next year, followed by the AI250 in 2027 - both of which are built on the company's mobile neural processing technology. The new chips are built for deploying AI models, rather than training them.
Rather than a custom Arm CPU, like the ones that Microsoft, AWS, and Google designed, Meta tells us the partnership will focus on optimizing the Arm-based silicon that it's already deploying. Like most hyperscalers and cloud providers, Meta is rolling out large quantities of Arm Neoverse cores across its AI datacenters; they just happen to be part of Nvidia's GB200 or GB300 NVL72 rack systems. Each of these racks is equipped with 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 of Nvidia's Neoverse-V2-based Grace CPUs.