Qualcomm doubles Snapdragon X channel funding as it ‘aggressively’ recruits partners

With Qualcomm quadrupling the size of its global commercial channel team and doubling partner funding this year, the chip designer plans to expand its global partner roster to more than 100 to fight Intel and AMD in the PC market, Global Channel Chief Kyler Houser says.

Qualcomm Global Channel Chief Kyle Houser said his team is quadrupling in size and doubling channel funding this year as it seeks to “aggressively” recruit partners to fuel the growth of its Snapdragon X processors in the PC market.

Houser, head of global commercial channel at Qualcomm, provided the details in his profile for CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs list, where he also said that the company is expanding to more than 100 channel partners globally after growing the roster from 13 partners in five regions to 40 partners in 12 regions over the past year.

For new partners, Houser said, his organization is looking beyond traditional reseller and distribution channels, such as managed services providers and global systems integrators.

“Qualcomm didn't have a commercial channel team or program two years ago, now we are scaling to 100+ partners across all regions in 2025,” wrote Houser, who held key roles in go-to-market, channel sales and marketing at Apple prior to joining Qualcomm in 2022.

The global channel chief said his team is quadrupling in size this year after growing just as much last year when Qualcomm launched its Snapdragon X processors in June as the first chips to power laptops in Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program. CRN reported in December that Qualcomm was ramping up hiring for key channel sales positions across the world.

With Qualcomm now offering a competitive alternative to Intel and AMD processors, Houser said it’s integral for channel partners to have the proper resources to ensure business customers are selecting the correct PCs for their workforce.

“For many years, selling a PC has been simple. Now with multiple PC manufacturers and new chipset architectures, partners must ensure their salesforce is ready to help guide the customer device selection process,” he wrote.

And with Copilot+ PCs featuring a slew of first- and third-party AI features, Houser said it’s important for customers to understand what kind of AI capabilities are available.

“Customers aren't sure what to do with AI, the benefits of AI, and where certain workloads should live,” where that’s the cloud, the data center or the PC, he said.

In his Channel Chiefs profile, Houser detailed how his global commercial channel organization has spent the last year influencing businesses and trying to get them to buy Snapdragon X-based PCs through activities with partners.

Between June and December last year, Houser said, his commercial channel team “launched and executed over 36 channel campaigns” with partners that prompted more than 6,000 business customers to test Snapdragon X-based PCs within the first two quarters of product availability. He added that his team also pushed “multiple scaled commercial deployments” in the past year.

Houser said his team also “built programs that enable [Qualcomm’s] channel partners to help customers migrate to Snapdragon X series from other architectures, such as Intel or AMD CPUs, which resulted in more than 400 channel-led proofs of concept in the first two quarters of product availability.

“The goal is to provide customers an ‘easy button’ approach to the architecture shift, create services revenues for our partners, and drive scaled adoption of Snapdragon X Series in the market,” he wrote.

Houser said other investments his team made over the past year included a 150 percent increase in market development funds, the launch of a “lucrative incentive program” to support the launch of Copilot+ PCs as well as the creation of three dedicated commercial partner campaign kits and over 100 partner sales tools and enablement assets.

Among the areas Houser would like to see partners invest in are “AI ecosystem services and labs to help customers define their AI strategy between edge and cloud,” which should include partnerships with ISVs, hardware vendors and chip vendors on “unique use cases.”

House said partners should also invest in “compelling offers, incentives and services that help drive the Windows 11 refresh to Snapdragon as well as demonstrate the lifecycle benefit of each chipset architecture across hardware.”