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AWS is deploying Qualcomm accelerators for AI inference tasks, while Qualcomm leverages AWS Bedrock to co-design custom chips across multiple product generations.

The reciprocal architecture partnership accelerates time-to-market for specialized inference silicon and reduces AWS’s reliance on traditional GPU vendors.
Trade pressSlicast · September 10, 2026 · Global · Source: The Decoder
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Qualcomm is designing custom chips for AWS across multiple product generations, with a focus on AI inference. The two companies are also collaborating on optical interconnects with bandwidth up to 1.6 terabits to handle the growing data traffic in AI infrastructure. Qualcomm brings its track record in power-efficient chip design, while Amazon contributes its cloud infrastructure. In return, Qualcomm uses AWS services like Amazon Bedrock to speed up its chip design process.

AWS represents Qualcomm’s third major data center win since June. Meta is taking Qualcomm’s Dragonfly C1000 server processor, and Microsoft is deploying Qualcomm’s HBC memory architecture in Azure. Qualcomm aims to hit $15 billion in data center revenue by 2029.

AWS will add Qualcomm’s designs alongside its own Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chip families. The move targets inference workloads, where energy cost per token drives the bottom line. Efficiency is also Qualcomm’s focus at the other end of the stack: edge devices. In March, Qualcomm’s AI research division released a framework that runs reasoning models on smartphones.

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