Qualcomm bets on a $200 billion CPU market with its AI data center pivot

Qualcomm spent years as the company inside your phone. Now it wants to be the company inside the data center, too. At its Investor Day on June 24, 2026, the chipmaker laid out a plan to push hard into AI infrastructure. It set a goal of more than $15 billion in data center revenue by fiscal 2029. Investors liked what they heard: shares jumped more than 12% in after-hours trading. The pitch rests on a market Qualcomm projects will reach approximately $200 billion for CPUs by fiscal 2029 or 2030. Dragonfly, Meta, and a much bigger target The centerpiece of the strategy is a new product family called Dragonfly. Its flagship is the Dragonfly C1000, a server CPU built for agentic AI workloads. The C1000 uses a multi-chiplet design. Instead of one giant slab of silicon, it stitches together several smaller pieces, an approach that can improve manufacturing yields and flexibility. The specs are aggressive. The chip packs more than 250 Oryon cores and runs at frequencies above 5 GHz. It is pitched as delivering more than double the performance per watt of competing server CPUs. Performance per watt matters more than it sounds. Data centers are increasingly limited by how much electricity t...