Qualcomm’s $2.4B Alphawave deal signals bold data center ambitions

Qualcomm says its Oryon CPU and Hexagon NPU processors are “well positioned” to meet growing demand for high-performance, low-power compute as AI inferencing accelerates and more enterprises move to custom CPUs housed in data centers.

“Qualcomm’s advanced custom processors are a natural fit for data center workloads,” Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon said in the press release. Alphawave’s connectivity and compute technologies can work well with the company’s CPU and NPU cores, he noted.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026.

Complementing the ‘great CPU architecture’ Qualcomm has been amassing

Client CPUs have been a “big play” for Qualcomm, Moor’s Kimball noted; the company acquired chip design company Nuvia in 2021 for $1.4 billion and has also announced that it will be designing data center CPUs with Saudi AI company Humain.

“But there was a lot of data center IP that was equally valuable,” he said. This acquisition of Alphawave will help Qualcomm complement the “great CPU architecture” it acquired from Nuvia with the latest in connectivity tools that link a compute complex with other devices, as well as with chip-to-chip communications, and all of the “very low level architectural goodness” that allows compute cores to deliver “absolute best performance.”

“When trying to move data from, say, high bandwidth memory to the CPU, Alphawave provides the IP that helps chip companies like Qualcomm,” Kimball explained. “So you can see why this is such a good complement.”