Qualcomm partners with Amazon to co-develop AI chips for AWS

Qualcomm just landed the kind of deal that transforms a company’s entire trajectory. The chipmaker announced a collaboration with Amazon to design custom silicon for AI data centers running on AWS, a partnership that could funnel up to $60 billion in commercial purchases to Qualcomm through September 2036. That’s not a licensing agreement or a vague memorandum of understanding. It’s a production-ready engagement, with Qualcomm already manufacturing the new chips and expecting revenue to flow starting in its fiscal Q1 2027, which maps to the December 2026 quarter. The deal structure The partnership centers on AI inference chips, the silicon that runs trained models at scale rather than training them from scratch. Qualcomm’s new chips integrate high-speed optical connectivity capable of hitting 1.6 terabits per second, a specification that matters enormously when you’re shuttling data across warehouse-scale computing clusters. Beyond chip sales, the deal has a software dimension. Qualcomm gets access to AWS AI infrastructure, including Amazon Bedrock, to improve its electronic design automation workflows. The financial engineering is equally telling. Qualcomm issued warrants giving A...