Amazon now holds an option to buy $4 billion of Qualcomm stock, giving the chipmaker a major hyperscaler endorsement as it seeks to expand into data-center infrastructure. Qualcomm disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it issued warrants enabling Amazon to acquire 25 million shares at $161.26 each, a package that expires on Sept. 3, 2036.
Qualcomm said the warrants vest in tranches tied to the completion of specific commercial arrangements and to purchases of up to $60 billion of its server chips and related technology. The announcement coincided with news of a multi-generation technology collaboration with Amazon Web Services, focused on building AI infrastructure optimized for inference workloads. Qualcomm’s stock rose about 4% on Tuesday after the deal was revealed.
The partnership gives Qualcomm a second hyperscaler showing of confidence after the company in June unveiled its Dragonfly C1000 central processing unit for data centers, and said Meta plans to use that CPU when it begins production in 2028. Qualcomm has laid out a roadmap of products intended to address AI workloads while keeping power consumption low, and the company is targeting $15 billion in data-center sales in fiscal 2029.
The move lands in a market dominated by Nvidia, which has become the largest player by value through its GPUs used to train and run large AI models. But demand for CPUs is rising as architects look to handle agentic and general-purpose AI tasks that sit alongside GPU-heavy training. Bank of America projects the CPU market could grow from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion by 2030, a shift that is drawing increased attention from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and GPU vendors that are adding CPU offerings.
Nvidia’s head of AI infrastructure, Dion Harris, warned industry observers that CPUs are becoming a bottleneck for expanding AI and agentic workflows, a point that underlines why hyperscalers are scouting diverse silicon sources. For Qualcomm, Amazon’s warrants and the AWS collaboration combine equity exposure and commercial opportunity, aligning incentives for the companies as Qualcomm pushes to convert design wins into large-scale data-center deployments.
What happens next will hinge on the commercial milestones that trigger vesting, and on whether Amazon follows through with purchases of Qualcomm server chips. Those outcomes will determine how much practical leverage the AWS relationship gives Qualcomm in its effort to carve market share from incumbent suppliers.
