Qualcomm said on 8 September that it had signed Amazon to a multi-generation deal for custom data centre chips, and granted Amazon warrants to buy 25 million Qualcomm shares at 161.26 dollars each, worth about 4 billion dollars if fully exercised. About 3.75 million of those shares vest immediately. The rest vest as Amazon buys hardware, up to a ceiling of 60 billion dollars in server chips and related technology over the next decade. Qualcomm shares rose more than 5 per cent.
The work centres on silicon for AI inference, the cheaper half of the workload that runs a trained model rather than training it, plus optical links carrying up to 1.6 terabits per second between racks. Qualcomm also agreed to expand its own use of Amazon Web Services for chip design. The company revealed a data centre processor called Dragonfly C1000 in June and said Meta would use it from 2028. It is targeting 15 billion dollars in data centre sales in its 2029 financial year.
This is the fourth arrangement in a year in which a chip supplier has tied equity or financing to a customer’s purchase volume, after Nvidia’s stake in MediaTek, Marvell’s warrants for Google and Lambda’s chip-backed debt. The structure aligns both sides, and it also means the buyer’s commitment is paid for partly in dilution of existing Qualcomm holders.
No chips exist yet. The silicon is a design collaboration with no product date, the 60 billion dollars is a cap rather than an order, and the warrants vest against purchases Amazon has not made. Whether Amazon buys near the ceiling depends on how Qualcomm’s inference parts compare with its own Trainium chips and with Nvidia’s.
