Qualcomm’s 12% Surge Signals Wall Street Finally Sees the Edge AI Opportunity

Qualcomm’s stock jumped 12% on Friday and has climbed 75% over the past month, hitting a record high as investors begin to grasp the chipmaker’s expanding role in the physical AI market. While Qualcomm trails Nvidia in powering large AI models, it’s leveraging its smartphone dominance to become a critical supplier for connected devices—from smart glasses and cars to robots.

OpenAI is reportedly working with Qualcomm on a chip for an upcoming AI-agent-driven device. Analyst Ivan Feinseth of Tigress Financial Partners, who rates Qualcomm a buy, expects this device to be “a phone that will be an AI-based operating system that does everything.” He believes Qualcomm is poised to lead the connected device revolution.

Qualcomm’s Arm-based chips are already inside Microsoft’s Surface PCs, Google and Meta’s smartglasses, and a growing number of vehicles. On Thursday, the company announced a deal with Stellantis—owner of Jeep, Dodge, and Maserati—to power its entire vehicle compute stack, from cockpit to driver-assist systems. Qualcomm’s automotive revenue hit $1.3 billion last quarter, up 38% year over year, and over 1 million cars now run on its processors.

A new frontier: data center chips. Qualcomm’s AI200 and AI250 accelerators, more programmable than Nvidia’s GPUs, are expected to ship later this year in full rack-scale systems. CEO Cristiano Amon hinted on the April earnings call that a major hyperscaler will take delivery within the year. Investors will likely get more details at Computex on June 2 and Qualcomm’s investor day on June 24.