Qualcomm, the $39 billion chip design company, may return to the data center chip market, according to a story in The Register.
“Qualcomm has teased a serious run at the data center market for years and in May CEO Cristiano Amon told the Computex conference in Taiwan that he sees ‘CPU changed for the age of AI’ as one way into the market,” the publication reported. “On Wednesday, Amon used Qualcomm’s Q3 earnings call to deliver an update on the company’s datacenter ambitions.”
“As inference games scale, cloud service providers are building dedicated inferencing clusters focused not only on performance, but also efficiency, specifically tokens per dollar and tokens per watt,” the CEO said. “These factors combined with the shift from merchant x86 CPUs to custom ARM compatible CPUs for both cloud computing and AI head node create an entry point for Qualcomm.”
Qualcomm also said it’s in “advanced discussions” with a hyperscale customer that wants to use its silicon in its data centers, according to The Register story.
On the earnings call, the Qualcomm CEO also said the company is building “a general-purpose CPU” “and is ‘very focused on hyperscalers’ because ‘They have first party workloads for ARM compatible CPU.’”
He also discussed a separate product for the data center market described as “the head unit for inferencing clusters,” then added “we have been building accelerator cards and we will be building a rack as well.”
