Another day, another chip company-A deal. This time, it’s Qualcomm, best known for its mobile phone chips (such as the modem in most iPhones). What Qualcomm is not known for is selling chips for data center servers, despite its valiant attempts to do so in the past. Will this time be different? We’ll see. At least Qualcomm has a customer for its AI chips—Humain, the Saudi Arabian AI startup that’s building data centers in that country. Qualcomm stock jumped 11% on Monday, as stocks tend to do when a company announces an #Artificial Intelligence deal (see: AMD, Broadcom, Oracle). Investors may have overreacted. Humain has also announced deals with Nvidia, the dominant AI chip designer, and AMD, which is trying to catch up to Nvidia. Humain is doing what OpenAI has done—hedge its bets on chip supply by striking deals with anyone that has a pulse. That makes sense for the Saudis, but it means there’s no certainty about how significant the Humain deal will end up for Qualcomm. Indeed, Humain’s deals with Nvidia and AMD involve more than twice as much capacity as the one with Qualcomm. Some history might be relevant: recall that Qualcomm in 2021 got close to selling its first AI data center chip, the AI 100, to Meta Platforms, before the deal fell through. (Humain’s deal is for the AI 200 and 250.) In Qualcomm’s favor, our story revealed that Meta felt the Qualcomm chip performed well, and its decision not to use it related to the software that accompanied the chip rather than the hardware. The quality of Qualcomm’s AI chips perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise, as its mobile chips have long been regarded as top-notch (something you notice when you’re using a phone without a Qualcomm chip, such as Google’s Pixel). To give it a leg up in data centers, Qualcomm announced the $2.4 billion purchase of Alphawave Semi in June. Qualcomm can also argue that its chips already power AI models on smartphones and personal computers. And the company knows how to make power-efficient chips, given that conserving batteries is vital in smartphones. Power efficiency is also top of mind right now for data center operators. A lot is at stake for Qualcomm. The glory days of the mobile market, by far its biggest source of revenue, are over. People aren’t buying new smartphones as often as they once did, which means sales of new mobile chips aren’t growing as fast. Meanwhile, Apple has begun moving away from Qualcomm modems in favor of one it has developed internally. Qualcomm has been trying for a long while to build up businesses selling chips for cars, mixed reality headsets and personal computers. But those businesses remain relatively small. To avoid becoming another Intel, Qualcomm needs something new to break through. Could AI data chips help? #The Most Important Thing https://fortune.com/2025/..