Qualcomm announces AI200 and AI250 AI chips to take on Nvidia and AMD

Qualcomm AI Chip

Qualcomm has formally stepped into the data-center AI hardware segment with the unveiling of two accelerator chips — the AI200 and AI250. The move positions Qualcomm to compete in a market currently led by Nvidia and AMD. Unlike its mobile-focused AI efforts in smartphones, these new devices address cloud inference and high-density compute deployments for generative AI, recommendation engines, and enterprise inference at scale. The reveal triggered an immediate response from investors, sending the company’s shares sharply higher on expectations of a material new revenue stream in infrastructure silicon.

AI200 chip features
The AI200 is aimed squarely at inference workloads. Qualcomm has equipped the accelerator with up to 768GB of LPDDR-class memory on a card, allowing it to host and serve very large models without offloading. The device is designed for direct-liquid-cooled racks to support dense deployments. Qualcomm is pitching AI200 to hyperscale operators and enterprise clouds as a power-efficient inference alternative. The design leans on the company’s Hexagon NPU lineage to drive high throughput under strict power envelopes — a constraint that remains central in AI inference economics.

AI250 chip features
The AI250 succeeds the AI200 and introduces a near-memory compute architecture intended to remove bottlenecks between compute and memory. Qualcomm is positioning this device for workloads that need sustained bandwidth and efficiency rather than peak FLOP marketing numbers. The company states that the architecture can deliver an order-of-magnitude uplift in effective memory bandwidth against current offerings while lowering energy per operation. Commercial timelines place AI250 after AI200, but ahead of broader refresh cycles in the AI accelerator market.

Stock price reaction
Following the announcement, Qualcomm shares on NASDAQ climbed by about 15% in early trade, with intraday moves touching nearly 20% as volumes spiked. The rally pushed the stock to a new 52-week high, indicating strong investor conviction that Qualcomm’s push into AI infrastructure silicon can diversify revenue beyond smartphones and establish it as a contender in the next major hardware growth cycle.