Qualcomm’s plan to sell server CPUs includes a partnership with Nvidia

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s CEO and president, makes official the company’s plan to design and sell server CPUs again. The move includes a partnership with Nvidia that will allow the two companies to integrate their chips into new AI computing systems.

Qualcomm has made official its plan to design and sell server CPUs again, and the move includes a partnership with Nvidia that will allow the two companies to integrate their chips into new AI computing systems.

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s CEO and president, made the announcement during his Monday keynote at the Computex 2025 event in Taiwan after the San Diego, Calif.-based company confirmed its intentions to enter the data center market in a legal filing last year.

“And 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 about the products,” he said in his keynote.

Amon noted a Monday announcement by Nvidia for a new silicon offering called NVLink Fusion that will allow Qualcomm to integrate custom CPUs with Nvidia’s GPUs to “build high-performance Nvidia AI factories.”

Nvidia pitched NVLink Fusion, which will also allow semiconductor firms to pair custom accelerator chips with Nvidia CPUs, as a way to build semi-custom, rack-scale AI infrastructure with hyperscalers who are increasingly focused on diversifying the chips they use.

“We have some very interesting IP on CPU, especially a CPU change for the age of AI, and it’s really an AI-centric data center. You saw the great announcement from Nvidia today,” Amon said. “[The] CPU becomes very important, but also [in terms of] how we think about clusters of inference that is about high performance and very low power.”

Amon said Qualcomm decided to re-enter the data center market for a similar reason it decided to make a revitalized push in the PC market with its Snapdragon X Series chips, which debuted in PCs with Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC branding last year.

“PC was [an] already established market with established players, but if we had something unique and disruptive, there’s room for Qualcomm,” he said.

Analyst thinks data center market is big enough for Qualcomm

With Qualcomm planning to introduce CPUs for data centers, the company is set to re-join a market that includes Intel and AMD as well as newer entrants, namely Ampere Computing and Nvidia. The latter company has seen a “surge” of its Grace CPUs shipped as part of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GB200 Superchips, according to Mercury Research.

Mario Morales, a group vice president at analyst firm IDC, said he believes “the data center market is large enough for a new entrant.”

“Over the coming five years, the data center will be the fastest growing segment for the semi market as a whole and in the last three years, we’ve seen the tremendous growth from Nvidia, but companies like Qualcomm have not benefited from that growth because they haven’t had a position in the space,” he wrote in a statement.

While Amon didn’t provide any further details about Qualcomm’s server CPU plans, the company said in a legal filing last year that it intended to continue the development of a server CPU and system-on-chip from technology it gained from its 2021 acquisition of chip design startup Nuvia. The Snapdragon X Series chips were the first Qualcomm product line to use custom, Arm-compatible CPU cores initially developed by Nuvia.

The legal filing mentioning Qualcomm’s server CPU plans was a complaint the company filed in April of 2024 against Arm, the British chip design licensor that sued Qualcomm and Nuvia in 2023 for allegedly breaching its licensing terms by continuing development of Nuvia’s CPU cores under Qualcomm after the acquisition closed.

The lawsuit ended in a mistrial in late December because a federal U.S. jury sided with Qualcomm on two key issues but deadlocked on a third. Arm, which sought the halting of sales and destruction of products based on the Nuvia CPU cores, plans to seek a retrial.

In January, Qualcomm hired Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Intel veteran who was most recently a senior fellow and chief architect for the company’s Xeon processors, as a senior vice president, according to a LinkedIn update by Kottapalli.

In a job posting from last December, the company disclosed that its data center team is developing a “high-performance, energy-efficient server solution.”

Qualcomm previously attempted to enter the server CPU market several years ago, but it stepped back from those efforts in 2018, which resulted in layoffs.