Qualcomm and Amazon announced a multigeneration collaboration on Tuesday to develop customized silicon for large artificial intelligence data centers, focusing on the chips that run trained models and on faster links between computing systems. Qualcomm said the arrangement combines its energy-efficient processing and system-design expertise with Amazon Web Services infrastructure as demand for AI computing, storage and memory bandwidth expands.
A filing accepted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 8 shows that Qualcomm issued an Amazon affiliate a warrant covering as many as 25 million Qualcomm shares at an exercise price of $161.26 each. The shares would be worth about $4.03 billion at that price. The warrant permits cashless exercise, expires on September 3, 2036, and carries no voting or shareholder rights while unexercised.
The SEC filing ties vesting to commercial agreements, binding purchase orders and Amazon payments for Qualcomm server chips, technology, systems and manufacturing services. Milestones extend to a maximum of $60 billion in payments during the warrant term. Qualcomm said 3.75 million shares vested when it issued the warrant on September 3 because of initial purchase commitments, while the remaining tranches depend on later business.
The companies also plan optical-connectivity products reaching 1.6 terabits per second and future generations, using Qualcomm serializer-deserializer and optical digital-signal-processing technology. These links are intended to address the growing flow of data inside AI facilities. Qualcomm will also expand its use of AWS services, including Amazon Bedrock, for electronic-design-automation workloads in an effort to shorten chip-development cycles.
The agreement pushes Qualcomm further into a data-center market beyond its traditional strength in smartphones and gives Amazon another route to customized infrastructure for AI inference, the stage when a trained model produces answers or predictions. Reuters reported that Qualcomm shares rose more than 7 percent in early trading after the announcement, although the stock had slipped about 1 percent during 2026 before Tuesday.
Neither company disclosed delivery dates, named specific processors or guaranteed that Amazon would make the full $60 billion in payments. The filing makes clear that much of the warrant depends on future orders and purchases. Development and purchasing milestones will therefore determine how quickly the partnership moves from design work to deployed systems and how large Amazon's eventual Qualcomm stake becomes.
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