Qualcomm bets beyond mobile with a $10bn AI chip deal and new AR silicon

Talks to buy Tenstorrent, custom data-centre chips, and a Snapdragon Reality Elite platform for smart glasses.

Qualcomm spent years as the chip in your Android phone. This month it made clear it wants to be a lot more than that. The company is in talks to acquire AI chip startup Tenstorrent for as much as 10 billion US dollars, and it has launched custom silicon for AI data centres, a market long dominated by Nvidia.

Closer to consumers, Qualcomm and Applied Materials introduced the Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset and an integrated visual system for smart glasses, built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the company behind Ray-Ban. That is a strong signal that the next wave of smart glasses will get a serious hardware platform rather than the underpowered chips that held earlier attempts back.

Why it matters

Phone sales have plateaued, so every big chip designer is hunting for the next growth market: AI data centres, AR glasses, anything that is not a saturated smartphone market. If the Tenstorrent deal goes through, Qualcomm becomes a genuine third force in AI silicon, which is good news for anyone who wants Nvidia to have real competition on price.

Source: Distill Intelligence