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to embrace the new technology and innovate it.

For example, what I like about what Meta is doing, they saw early on that you're going to have devices that you can wear like glasses because of the simple concept of which started as a conversation about the metaverse, which is, can I merge the physical and the digital world? Can I superimpose, you know, is that gonna be important for the future social, for example, in the future how people communicate with each other and call and messages like you think about WhatsApp.

an example but then also about this agent that where you see uh the devicee and there's no legacy there's nothing to worry about you can start with the new and i think that's what we see the excitement and the focus of meta uh how they started with glasses and the ray-ban meta is an overwhelming success uh you know i think exceed everybody expectations and i think show what's possible but For companies to continue to be in the lead, you have to keep going.

Like you have to keep going.

You have to keep pushing the use cases, the experience.

And I think you started to see now.

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Yeah.

At the end of the cycle, right? You do get, um, a portion that's, you know, the market gets to a state of maturity, become more of a placement rate market.

Having said that, the smartphone is a big market.

Uh, it's 1.2 billion phones sold every year.

Even if you don't want any new feature, you use your phone a lot, after two, three, four, five years, you're gonna buy a new one.

However, within that base, there are a couple things that happened, which has been, um, very telling.

The premium and the high tier as a percentage of the total market continue to expand, and it's been like clockwork year over year.

And I'm curious how much of that strategy that he had at Modular is now the Qualcomm chip and data center strategy.

And maybe you can shine some light on that.

Yeah, look, what we did in the automotive sector, I think, to be honest, we're very proud of it and positively surprised about how fast what we did became very successful.

I think we're now kind of marching towards probably being the largest supplier of semiconductor to the car industry.

And what we did was understanding about where the auto industry was going and develop really a platform.

What we did, what we call the Snapdragon Digital Chassis.

What makes us really unique in this field is we understood that we had capabilities in all domains that were relevant to the car.

And we could bring the combination of the best of consumer electronics and our experience in consumer electronics and mobility, as well as deliver a platform that is really industrial grade with the reliability that is required in the automotive industry.

How do you think about this? How does Qualcomm's kind of strategic design build around this huge constraint, which is like driving prices up pretty massively.

Mm-hmm.

You ...

The data center is going to have to evolve, and it's already on its way to do that into a heterogeneous compute.

You have different engines that do different things.

CPUs are going to be very important for orchestrator and agents, and CPU demand will continue to rise, and that's also true on the other side of data center, phones.

As, as those agents get deployed on devices, they have a lot of CPU demand.

But you're gonna have different engines for different things, right? For example, for inference, we see there's engine now for prefill, engine for decode-

[laughs]

How do you fit that into the conversations now about AI safety and efficiency?

Well, I think that's actually a great area to be part of the conversation.

Look, the main announcement that we have on this Snapdragon Summit right now is actually we have now clarity what an AI smartphone look like.

We've been talking about that for a couple of years.

there has been a number of technologies in ai that made it possible and we started to see this become a reality you have a lot of phones now that are basically ai smartphone they have agents and those agents start to operate the phone for you the way for you to think about this john is the phone has been designed for you to operate you go to the apps you do things yourself but then there's also agents they're going to go to your apps for you it's going to go to the cloud and it's going to do things for you on your behalf it's very interesting engineering challenge we now have to design chips to allow the phone to be working even when you're not operating it and with an all-day battery life and a lot of ai at the edge but for those things to be possible There are two things going to be very, very important.

Trust.

You have to trust the agent and the AI is going to be working on your behalf.

What do you think happens now? Does this kind of new wave in foldables provide some upward pressure? And how are you preparing?

Yes.

This is because of there is not enough memory.

The prices are so high, so the units are much lower.

Consumers are gonna react to the lower price.

The middle and the low part of the market, it's, uh, significantly contracted.

The premium tier has some resilient.

But even in the premium tier, what we see is a mixed change.

Of data center, automotive, and IoT, what, what pushes that most?

Looking back on that period, is there anything that you would have done differently?

I don't know.

I think possibly.

Like what? At that time, we were starting the process of transforming the company.

We just had some challenges that we had to overcome on a legal battle, overcoming a hostile acquisition attempt.

Very challenging time.

And one of the things I did at that time was I said we needed to accelerate the technology transition to be able to change the direction of the company.

I was playing Snake on my Nokia.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, you know, at the time, I did not ...

You know, the market wasn't ready for it, only until later.

So it was kind of the probably the right decision for Qualcomm at the time.

This is a different conversation.

It's a different data center right now.

This is about AI.

Please

Listen in.

So when I say I have now $5 billion of revenue, uh, projected for fiscal '27, uh, with those customers, for that $5 billion, I have secure the capacity from the manufacturer as well as memory.

I also have memory, uh, for what we do in an accelerator.

So we're excited about that, and I think, you know, uh, we're very confident in the forecast we're providing.

... like three years, five years?

We, we always do that.

Given our scale, I think if you look, uh, to our, to our history just the past few years, we have been doing long-term agreements, uh, both with customers as well on the supply side.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

But if I step back, you know, we have been diversifying the company, going to new industries.

And in, in those new industries, we're actually been building a combination of silicon software.

And there has been a lot of acquisitions have done through the years.

For, for, I'll remind you that we, you know, as we talk about we're going to industrial, we bought companies like Edge and Pulse, we bought Arduino, which is one of the largest, I think, hardware, uh, developer community with 32 million developers.

And then as you would imagine, as we go to data center, we have to build a full stack solution.

Is that gonna be the strategy for Qualcomm going forward? You gotta buy the whole stack.

Um, when it comes to agentic experience on consumer devices, what does that look like in your view?

Okay.

This is actually one of the questions I love answering because, you know, even though we have been changing the Qualcomm and we're becoming a much more diversified company, we're still, uh, you know, one of the biggest providers of mobile technology.

And it's fascinating now to see what's happened with those agents and what's happened with the mobile phone.

When those-- When we talk about agents, and I'm kinda convinced 2026 gonna be the year of agents.

We're starting to see this now getting scale.

And, and those things became really popular and went viral, I think, on the internet when, uh, OpenClau was launched.

Um, do you believe this is still gonna be, you know, central to the world of agentic AI, and how do you expect our relationship with our smartphone to change?

AI, meta.

All of them.

And you have different things that people wear.

Glasses is the easiest one to understand, but they're going to be more.

They're going to be jewelry.

pins, pendants, things that you wear, and it can connect you to an agent and now have this conversation.

If the AI understands what we write, can read everything we read, see everything we see, the type of use cases are going to be a lot more personal, needs to have a lot more context and needs to happen a little different because if it not you just pull up your phone and you do it today so how do i describe that i think for you like for example you'll be walking around and you have a glass and you're going to see i really like this i like to buy this how much is it on amazon and it's going to say oh it's just how this is this is how much it is amazon and they're going to say can you Can you render how I'm going to look with this? And it's going to get rendered.

Can you just give me some perspective on robotics? Yes.

What sort of tam, what sort of expansion of Q- Qualcomm's business will this mean for you?

you?Yeah, look, uh, y- you know, this is a great question, and I wanna maybe start the answer by saying, uh, you know, why would not anybody, uh, you know, bet on Qualcomm diversification efforts? We started as a mobile company.

If you look at what we're doing right now, we expanded into PC.

We became one of the largest providers of semiconductor to automotive.

We're going to industrial.

We're going to robotics.

We're going to broadband and networking, and I think, um, the data center was a natural thing.

[laughs]

So you are not doing your own chip, you're not doing merchant silicon, your own designs for market, you're doing an ASIC with someone.

So we have said that our data center product, and I need to make sure I don't front run my investor day.

I'm trying.

Yeah, I understand that.

My data center product offering includes three vectors.

One is CPU.

We are developing a CPU, and we're very flexible.

But actually, Qualcomm's story has really changed in that time, right? So in this world where we're moving to inference and we're moving to a GenTik, how are you positioning Qualcomm, right? The CPU is important, but you must think differently to how you did three years ago.

How can you kind of navigate this to your advantage? Sure.

Yes, and that's a great observation.

That's why I think there's a lot of unnecessary, I think, speculation right now.

Here's what's going to happen.

We saw this with COVID.

OEMs, the first thing they're going to do, they're going to prioritize premium and high tier because those are more resilient, I think, to price increases.

We are going to see probably adjustment in prices on handsets.

Cristiano, how much can you accelerate there to make up for the handset issues?

How can you kind of navigate this to your advantage? Sure.

Yes, and that's a great observation.

That's why I think there's a lot of unnecessary, I think, speculation right now.

Here's what's going to happen.

We saw this with COVID.

OEMs, the first thing they're going to do, they're going to prioritize premium and high tier because those are more resilient, I think, to price increases.

we are going to see probably adjustment in prices on handsets.

But how do you see that translating from your order backlog to revenue growth and hitting milestones like a billion dollar quarter?

When's it coming?

But, uh, but, but here's, uh... y- you- we need to be thinking ab- about this a little bit different, right? Um, wearable is one of, one of the things.

There's gonna be more.

So, so I'll, I'll start first as answering your question.

Uh, this whole category of personal AI devices, it's- humans already decided what they're gonna wear a long time ago, right? So, uh, uh, I don't think we, you and I, are gonna be wearing, like, a big helmet.

I think we can wear glasses.

Uh, we can wear jewelry.

So Cristiano, when you think about, "All right, I'm gonna put chips in glasses and maybe some other different formats, uh, and people will use them and have X experience," what is that experience?

Listen to this.

Yes, look, we're incredibly excited about this.

This is a new chapter, I think, of the Qualcomm expansion and diversification.

I think we're going to robotics.

We like robotics a lot because by definition it's an edge AI problem to solve.

Not different than what we did in automotive.

You cannot...

How soon is that reality? Already we have robots in manufacturing and industrials, but how soon is it fully autonomous robots? How soon do we start to have the humanoid versions in our houses? Look,

How soon is that reality? Already we have robots in manufacturing and industrials, but how soon is it fully autonomous robots? How soon do we start to have the humanoid versions in our houses?

Look, the way we think about this is things that you didn't thought were possible to do with a robot, you can do it right now using AI.

I think industrial robot is the big, largest opportunity that we see in front of us, and it's probably starting as early as 2026.

When you use AI to train a robot on one given task, it's a very well-defined problem, and you can do this and you put it into production.

Consumer robot, the one that is gonna be in your house and do everything for you, it's gonna take a little bit of time, but it's going to happen and it's gonna be a big opportunity.

I like to do this parallel that we saw with automotive.

When we start talking about autonomous cars, A lot of companies went in and said, we're just going to get this full-autonomous robotaxi.

How do you see that ecosystem evolving?

Which of those is the fastest moving for you right now?

Look, right now, what you probably see in terms of the speed, it's automotive.

I think we have been growing significantly on an year-over-year basis.

And most of our growth, again, like the conversation with handsets, has nothing to do about the market size.

It's just us gaining share.

Those cars becoming really computer on wheels.

And we build a digital platform for the car industry, which is the Snapdragon digital chassis.

How is it different from an NVIDIA or AMD GPU, a Broadcom Marvel XPU, or this large body of startups that are basically chasing rack-scale solutions for AI?

How will it play with agentic AI?

Very good.

Look, great talking to you.

I think we're missing you here.

This has been a great event.

There's a lot going on.

We have a lot of announcements yesterday, a lot of announcements today.

Do you think it holds firm? Do you think positions get loosened up? Do you think you have opportunities to gain share?

Did you benchmark against that?

So two different important parts.

First, the architecture is scalable, starting from basic level ADAS all the way to multiple cameras and multiple sensors for you to do navigation on autopilot in urban environment and highway environments.

That means it can scale to... entry-level ADAS systems and entry-level cars, all the way to the full capabilities.

The other thing is, has been certified now in 60 countries, and it's launching, and a lot of people will be able to see the performance.

Actually, we're super excited for people to see how it performs.

And one thing that is great about this, we've done this with BMW, but it's available for the entire industry.

How much is this going to drive growth for you, for the business in the longer term?

So I thought that a good starting point would be to ask when smartphone and handset is no longer the majority of revenue and when that kind of tipping point or how close toward that tipping point is where your diversification efforts have shifted the business model.

Very good.

Ed, great talking to you.

Look, I don't really understand what not to like about it.

We have been consistently delivering what we said we're going to do.

I think the company has changed.

The company created a lot of growth opportunities.

May I ask what you think investors need to understand and remodel for? Or even what is it that investors are misunderstanding about that process, Cristiano?

And who are some of your customers, Cristiano, both on the licensing side and on the direct chip manufacturing side?

You know, I love answering this question.

I love it, because part of the transformation of Qualcomm, our customers are changing.

Every year, we get a whole new suite of customers that will go to different industries.

But let me start answering the licensing business.

I think our customers are the smartphone OEMs.

All of the smartphone OEMs, we license all the standard essential patents for phones.

Look, I

As someone that started as an engineer, to be there in that moment, what was that

like? The whole thing for me, look, I'm incredibly proud and I feel privileged to have the trust of our board, our investors, and most importantly, all the Qualcomm employees to lead this company.

When I joined Qualcomm as an engineer, I never had any dreams I'll be a CEO.

Never expected that we will be relevant and an important partner to so many industries, so many countries.

It's incredible.

At the same time, it comes with a huge IT'S REALLY HUMBLING AND THAT WAS A GREAT MOMENT FOR ME.

WHAT DID QUALCOMM SECURE FROM THAT TRIP? Look, as you know, we just released a little bit of some, I'll say, data points.

So the data center push, there's an AMD in there, there's an Intel, and if I'm right, didn't Qualcomm try data centers in the past? How do you make this successful this time?