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Qualcomm issues warrants to Amazon to acquire $4 billion worth of chipmaker's stock as part of AI infrastructure deal

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Why This Matters

Qualcomm's AWS partnership gives the mobile chipmaker a marquee hyperscaler customer for its data center push, validating its bid to compete with Nvidia in AI inference silicon. The unusual structure — $4 billion in warrants issued to Amazon — ties a major cloud buyer's financial interest directly to Qualcomm's success, echoing the circular vendor-customer equity deals now common in AI infrastructure. For the industry, it signals hyperscalers' continued appetite for power-efficient alternatives to Nvidia GPUs.

Key Takeaways
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Qualcomm shares rose 4% on Tuesday after the company announced a data center infrastructure partnership with Amazon Web Services, a major win as the chipmaker tries to take on Nvidia in the artificial intelligence market.

As part of the agreement, Qualcomm said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it issued warrants to Amazon to acquire 25 million shares in the company at $161.26 apiece for a total investment of $4 billion.

According to a press release about the technology pact, Qualcomm is working with Amazon "across multiple generations of customized silicon" to help build out AWS' AI infrastructure, specifically focused on inference.

"As AI workloads grow exponentially — driving unprecedented demand for compute, storage, networking and memory bandwidth, and energy-efficient infrastructure — the collaboration brings together Amazon's comprehensive, secure, and price-performant AI infrastructure with Qualcomm Technologies' leadership in power-efficient processing, silicon design and system-level integration," the statement said.

Qualcomm is known for making processors that power smartphones and other mobile devices. But the company made a big splash in June, when it revealed a central processing unit for data centers called Dragonfly C1000, and said that Meta would use it when it starts production in 2028.

The chipmaker said the new CPU was built for agentic AI and focuses on offering computing performance without using too much power. Qualcomm said at the time that it's targeting $15 billion in data center sales in fiscal 2029, and pointed to a road map for going after the market with several different products, including an AI chip and a product that will tie multiple chips together.