Qualcomm disclosed Tuesday it expects $15 billion in data-center revenue by 2029, a figure that did not exist in the segment three years ago. The company acquired Modular, a compiler and runtime architecture firm, to power custom silicon deployments at hyperscalers. The guidance lands six quarters after Qualcomm began shipping its Cloud AI inference chips to Microsoft and Meta. The number is roughly one-third of Qualcomm's trailing twelve-month revenue, which sat at $38.9 billion as of December 2024.
Modular's toolchain allows cloud operators to design inference accelerators without rewriting application code for each new chip generation. Qualcomm will fold that stack into its existing Arm-based server roadmap. The terms were not disclosed, but Modular had raised $130 million across three rounds, most recently at a reported $600 million valuation in Series B. Founder Chris Lattner, formerly at Apple and Tesla, built Modular to abstract away the deployment friction that has kept custom chips confined to research labs. Qualcomm now owns that abstraction layer and the recurring design-services relationship it creates with AWS, Google, and ByteDance.
The $15 billion target matters because it represents exit velocity from the handset cycle. Qualcomm's smartphone chipset business grew 5 percent year-over-year in the December quarter, but unit shipments in Android flagships are structurally flat. Data-center silicon, by contrast, carries 60-plus percent gross margins when sold as a co-designed part with cloud hyperscalers, compared to low-50s for mobile SoCs sold into commoditized handset supply chains. The company is also explicit that these are inference chips, not training clusters. Inference deployments scale with application usage, not model development, which means the revenue is tied to actual workload growth rather than speculative capex bubbles in foundation-model training.
The second-order effect is competitive. Qualcomm is now structurally long on Arm's data-center instruction set at the same moment Nvidia is designing its own Arm CPU cores and Amazon has shipped six generations of Graviton. If Modular's compiler works as advertised, Qualcomm can offer hyperscalers a silicon design partnership that includes both the inference accelerator and the CPU complex, all within a unified software stack that does not require CUDA or proprietary Nvidia tooling. That puts Qualcomm in direct competition with Broadcom and Marvell, both of which run similar custom-silicon programs for Google and Meta. Broadcom reported $12.2 billion in custom-chip revenue for fiscal 2024, so Qualcomm's $15 billion figure by 2029 would place it in the same weight class.
Operators should watch for two milestones. First, whether Qualcomm discloses design wins with a third hyperscaler beyond Microsoft and Meta in the June quarter earnings call. Second, whether the company breaks out data-center revenue as its own segment in fiscal 2026, which would signal the business has crossed materiality thresholds for standalone reporting. Both events would confirm the $15 billion guide is backed by signed multi-year wafer commitments, not pipeline optimism.
Qualcomm's handset exposure was 62 percent of revenue in fiscal 2024. By 2029, if the data-center forecast holds, that figure drops below 50 percent. The company is no longer a mobile-chip vendor that also sells into cars and infrastructure. It is becoming a custom-silicon house that happens to still service Samsung.
The takeaway
Qualcomm's $15B data-center target by 2029 shifts the business from mobile-chip dependency to hyperscale co-design margin.
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