Qualcomm Takes Aim at Nvidia

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00:00On the name, Ed, it says what it is on the label. It's an AI chip.

00:03Right. 200.

00:05200, apparently. Just how big of a rivalry will this pose to NVIDIA?

00:10Yeah, I mean, the stock reaction, a gain of almost 9%, biggest jump since early April,

00:15the stock's now trading at its highest level since July of last year, shows that this is real.

00:22The AI200 is an MPU, a neural processing unit.

00:25It's just a fancy way of saying it's a purpose-designed accelerator card.

00:30For AI and machine learning tasks.

00:32And what Qualcomm is saying is that it ships next year, 2026.

00:37The first customer is Humane, the Saudi Arabian AI startup.

00:41It's basically a holding or umbrella company for the nation's data center build out.

00:46And they're committing to 200 megawatts, which is modest in the scheme of everything that's going on.

00:51But now as we approach a 10% gain, you know, the market is there for Qualcomm to participate in.

00:58And it's one that they've not been in so far.

01:00So it's a very interesting reaction here.

01:03Ed, you have, as the co-host of Bloomberg Tech and a journalist who just breaks news on a regular basis,

01:09a better view than most at the race to beat NVIDIA in terms of building chips.

01:16We've heard about other competitors before, but how close is anyone coming and how worried should Jensen Wang be?

01:25Well, again, the reaction in Qualcomm shares shows that the market is taking this product seriously.

01:31But it is a small and early entry into a market in which NVIDIA holds a monopoly.

01:37The issue is that if you take Qualcomm as a case study, it's a future product.

01:422026 is next year.

01:44And the way that NVIDIA has been able to hold a lead out over AMD and Qualcomm now entering that market

01:50and other specialist silicon names like Grok, Grok with a Q, is that it basically has told the market its plans for the next five years.

01:58So we already know what the next generation GPU from NVIDIA is and when it's going to come.

02:03And so if you are planning data center capacity and doing deals all over the planet,

02:07you know, we already know that NVIDIA has, you know, future deals in 2026 at the same time that Qualcomm's made this announcement with Humane.

02:14And that's the difficulty that these new entrants to the market are dealing with.

02:18Then it will become what is the performance of this accelerator card?

02:22Is it better at certain tasks in the inference context than NVIDIA's gear?

02:27We just don't know because it's not yet deployed.