▲ Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI
US mobile semiconductor specialist Qualcomm has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud company, to develop artificial intelligence (AI) chips worth up to 60 billion dollars, or approximately 80 trillion won.
Qualcomm announced on the 8th, local time, that it has signed a multi-year agreement with AWS to jointly develop custom AI inference semiconductors spanning multiple generations.
Under this partnership, the two companies plan to develop high-performance, power-efficient chips to respond to the surge in demand for AI bandwidth.
Specifically, Qualcomm will be responsible for power-efficiency technology and chip design accumulated from mobile semiconductors, while AWS will provide AI infrastructure such as Amazon Bedrock.
In addition, the two companies agreed to cooperate on developing ultra-fast optical interconnect solutions supporting high bandwidths.
Qualcomm has also decided to grant Amazon warrants for common stock linked to the amount Amazon spends on purchasing server chips, technology, and services, with a fixed exercise price of 161.26 dollars per share.
Initially, 3.75 million warrants will be granted, and if Amazon's purchase amount reaches up to 60 billion dollars over the next 10 years, the total issuance will increase to 25 million shares.
If Amazon acquires and exercises all warrants under this agreement, it will amount to approximately 4 billion dollars, or about 5.4 trillion won.
Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, said, "As AI demand accelerates, data center infrastructure requires advancements in both computation and connectivity to deliver higher performance efficiently," adding, "Based on our decades-long leading capabilities in power-efficient computing, Qualcomm will deliver breakthrough performance and help realize next-generation AI infrastructure."
While Qualcomm has positioned itself as a top company in the mobile chip sector, its standing has recently narrowed over the past few years as Apple developed its own smartphone and modem chips, and Samsung Electronics increased the proportion of its own Samsung Exynos chips instead of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips in Galaxy smartphones.
In this situation, Qualcomm is showcasing a business diversification strategy to advance into the AI infrastructure sector by leveraging its accumulated power-efficiency technology, aiming to boost data center revenue to 15 billion dollars by 2029.
Meanwhile, equity-linked deals such as the one signed by Qualcomm and Amazon on this day are increasingly becoming a growing trend in the recent AI industry.
AMD, a competitor to Nvidia, signed an agreement last October granting the right to acquire up to 10% of its stake depending on OpenAI's chip purchase amount, and recently, Marvell Technology handed over stock purchase rights of up to 12.2 billion dollars to Google.
Following the news of the partnership between the two companies, Qualcomm's stock price surged nearly 9% in early trading, but later gave up some of those gains, hovering around 175 dollars, up 3.8% from the previous day's close as of 1:20 PM Eastern Time.
(Photo: Getty Images)
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