Qualcomm CEO says AI firms want 100B-parameter models running on phones by 2028

Your phone may be headed for a much more demanding job description. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says AI companies are already asking for smartphones that can run 100-billion-parameter models continuously by 2028. Amon made the comments in an interview on October 8, 2026. He described a shift toward always-on “agentic” AI, meaning software that acts on your behalf rather than waiting for you to tap an app. What AI companies are asking for According to Amon, the models AI firms want would operate with personal context. They would understand what a user intends, reason through the request, and plan actions on their own. The scale of the request becomes clearer next to what Qualcomm just shipped. At its Snapdragon Summit on September 22, 2026, the company unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Extreme Gen 6 platforms. Those chips, built on 2nm technology, are designed to run mixture-of-experts models of up to 30 billion parameters directly on the device. Going from 30 billion to 100 billion is more than a threefold jump, inside the same rough physical footprint of a phone. How Qualcomm is squeezing big models into small devices Qualcomm is leaning on several techniques to make the m...