Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon delivered Monday (May 19) its keynote at COMPUTEX 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan confirming reports the company will soon enter the data center market.

The confirmation came minutes before he ended his keynote speech although Amon said more details will be announced soon. Nonetheless, he hinted Qualcomm has some “very interesting IPs” on CPUs that will complement the current demands in the data center industry in the age of AI.

“I just want to tell you we are expanding into the data center. I won’t give you all the details right now soon you’ll hear from us,” said Amon.

“If we (Qualcomm) have something unique and disruptive, there’s room for Qualcomm and I think that’s exactly the approach we’re taking for the data center…so stay tuned and hopefully we’ll do something that will provide a great contribution for the industry.”

Deal With Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN AI

Amon’s announcement actually marked Qualcomm’s re-entry into the data center industry. In 2017, Qualcomm Data Center Technologies, Inc. has started the commercial shipment of its first 10nm server processor series, the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family. Reports said Qualcomm slowed down its data center foray marked by employee layoffs in 2018 followed by the exit of its Centriq CPUs in the market in 2019.

Qualcomm’s entry into the data center market started to float last week after it sealed partnership with Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN AI, a new AI cloud venture backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). The deal came to being during the sidelines of the state visit of U.S. President Donald Trump that also saw NVIDIA making similar deal with HUMAIN AI.

The deal would mean Qualcomm supplying AI and CPU solutions for next-generation cloud-to-edge data centers in Saudi Arabia.

The data center CPU market is currently dominated by Arm, Intel, and AMD.

Growing Role of Snapdragon in AI Era

During his COMPUTEX’s pre-opening keynote, Amon also emphasized how the company’s Snapdragon X Series is enabling the transition to AI PCs.

“Now we are at this point that AI is getting ready for production is getting ready to be deployed and is going to be deployed at scale and it will take advantage of a lot of the computing devices that we have at the edge,” said Amon.

“As a result, we’re going to see the transition of new use cases and experiences and that is actually going to influence the device itself and what we’re doing as a company is to make sure we can bring AI inference everywhere to every single device.”

Amon also highlighted Qualcomm’s growing partnerships with top PC innovators in bringing personal computing experiences to more users. Specifically, he said about 85 designs launched or in development across every price tier bearing the Snapdragon X series and more than 100 designs targeted for commercial release next year.

Amon’s keynote also featured brief presentations from major PC makers, which include ASUS, HP, and Lenovo.

As AI accelerates at the edge, Qualcomm has been powering devices for the age of AI, across not only PCs, but also mobile, smart glasses, auto and more. After establishing performance and multi-day battery life as table stakes, Amon said they are changing the mindset of what is AI and that is it is becoming the new user interface.

19 May 2025