Qualcomm bets on cloudy AI. Arm thinks it's getting edgy

"Both companies announced quarterly results on Wednesday and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon used his company's earnings call to add a little more color to last week's news that his company will enter the datacenter market with chips designed to run inferencing workloads while using less energy than required by rivals' hardware. Amon said Qualcomm is building a system on chip and a "card" for its forthcoming inferencing hardware,"

"But he thinks some of the action will move outside bit barns. "What we're seeing is all kinds of demand for different architectures and compute type of solutions to run inference not in the cloud," he said on Arm's earnings call. "Obviously, you're going to not rely 100 percent on something on the edge. But today, it's the reverse. It's about 100 percent on the cloud. And we think that is going to change.""

"Amon, however, said Qualcomm won't have "material" datacenter revenue to report until 2027. The CEO had happier news in the form of record quarterly sales for automotive chips ($1.1 bn), which he said demonstrates Qualcomm is now a leader in the field. He expressed optimism the company's PC chips have potential for growth, and pointed to strong sales and growth of modems and similar comms technology - and having achieved that after Apple decided to build its own modems instead of buying them from Qualcomm."

Qualcomm plans to enter the datacenter market with energy-efficient chips targeted at inferencing workloads, developing a system-on-chip and a card for forthcoming inferencing hardware. Arm views energy consumption as a datacenter bottleneck and expects demand to shift from training to inference while inference deployments broaden beyond centralized cloud datacenters toward diverse architectures and edge locations. Both companies anticipate surging demand for inferencing capability. Qualcomm does not expect material datacenter revenue until 2027 but reported record automotive chip sales and continued growth in PC chips and modem-related communications technology.

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