Qualcomm Just Promised $15 Billion in AI Chip Sales, but There’s a Catch: The Chips Don’t Exist Yet

Cristiano Amon walked into Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM | QCOM Price Prediction) Investor Day on June 24, 2026 with a number designed to be repeated.

Over $15 billion in annual data center AI chip sales by fiscal 2029, up from $5 billion in 2027, alongside a $40 billion non-handset revenue target and adjusted EPS above $18 by that year.

Qualcomm shares rose 13.3% to 15% in after-hours trading. Then they handed most of it back. By the close on June 25, the stock sat at $204.90, down 7.66% from June 22 and off 9.38% over the trailing week. The catch is that the chips powering that $15 billion don’t exist in shipping form yet. Qualcomm’s data center CPUs come online in 2028, with custom AI inference silicon still being designed. Investors are underwriting a roadmap.

The math behind the promise

Qualcomm’s actual current business looks like this. Total Q2 FY26 revenue was $10.599 billion, down 3.46% year over year, with handsets still accounting for $6.024 billion of that and falling 13% under memory supply constraints and Chinese OEM weakness.

Data center revenue from the recently closed Alphawave Semi acquisition isn’t separately reported yet. So Amon is telling shareholders that a segment producing roughly nothing in fiscal 2026 will produce around 34% of fiscal 2025’s entire revenue base three years from now.

Moreover, Qualcomm announced a $3.92 billion stock acquisition of AI software firm Modular and a multi-year CPU supply agreement with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META). The Dragonfly C1000 is set for 2028 production and a Dragonfly AI300 inference part teased for later. Per the Q2 FY26 filing the hyperscaler engagement is “on track for initial shipments later this calendar year.” Thus, this is language that has not been upgraded to “shipping.”

Nvidia’s moat is the actual variable

Bloomberg Tech’s Ed Ludlow laid out the competitive geometry. “NVIDIA absolutely dominates the market and whatever’s left, AMD kind of comes up and gets the rest,” he said, noting that NVIDIA holds what Bloomberg defines as a technical monopoly. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) has more than 70% market share and that both it and AMD ship new architectures annually while Qualcomm’s parts are years away.

In addition, NVIDIA put up $75.246 billion in Data Center revenue in a single quarter in Q1 FY27. This grew 92% year over year. Qualcomm’s entire 2029 data center target would equal one quarter at Jensen Huang’s current run rate.

Furthermore, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) is cementing the silver medal slot with the Meta-anchored MI450 deployment. Ludlow conceded the technical case for Qualcomm, calling its parts “highly performing, very efficient chips on a dollar per token basis or a dollar per kilowatt basis.” Efficiency narratives win when the cost of power, not silicon, becomes the gating constraint.

Micron’s quarter is the warning Qualcomm should read

The same afternoon Amon was selling the future, Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) reported the present. Fiscal Q3 revenue of $41.46 billion beat the $35.25 billion consensus by 17.60%. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $25.11 versus $20.28 expected. Additionally, GAAP gross margin hit 84.6% from 37.7% a year earlier.

Per Sanjay Mehrotra, the result is “the strategic value of memory in the AI era”. Plus, the newly signed multi-year Strategic Customer Agreements that lock in HBM4 demand.

Morningstar lifted fair value to $200 from $155, conceding that Qualcomm “is not expected to unseat Nvidia’s dominance in AI” while still capturing meaningful share. What to watch over the next four quarters is whether the hyperscaler customer gets named. You should also watch whether Meta’s CPU order converts into a deposit. Then, whether the Modular software stack starts producing benchmarks.