Qualcomm Bets on AI Wearables to Replace the Smartphone

Qualcomm Is Designing the Chips for Whatever Comes After the Smartphone

Qualcomm, the San Diego-based semiconductor company best known for powering the majority of Android smartphones, is making its most aggressive public push yet toward a world where AI wearables — not phones — become the dominant consumer computing device. On June 16, 2026, CEO Cristiano Amon appeared on CNBC's The Tech Download podcast and revealed that Qualcomm is actively developing over 40 new AI device designs. At the same time, reports emerged that the company is in talks to acquire AI chip startup Tenstorrent for between $8 billion and $10 billion. The moves, taken together, paint a clear picture of a company repositioning itself as the central chip supplier for an agent-first computing era.

40 New AI Device Designs and the Rise of the Software Agent

The device categories Qualcomm is working on go well beyond anything resembling a smartphone. According to CNBC, the designs span smart glasses, jewelry, camera-equipped earbuds, wearable pins, and watches — all intended to remain with users throughout the day and serve as persistent endpoints for AI software agents. Amon was explicit about the scope of what his company is building toward.

"Right now, we have over 40 designs of those devices, and I'm telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad," Amon said on CNBC.

The animating idea behind all of these form factors is the software agent — AI systems capable of carrying out complex tasks across different services and applications, going significantly further than traditional digital assistants. Amon has argued that agents will become the "new app," displacing the app-centric model that has defined mobile computing for nearly two decades. He described 2026 as "the year of agents" during Mobile World Congress earlier this year, and that framing was on full display in his June 16 interview.

"The new classes of devices...are going to be around the agent," Amon said.

For Qualcomm, this is more than a product vision — it is a market positioning argument. The company currently powers roughly 5 billion devices globally, according to Fortune. But the smartphone market, while still significant, is maturing. According to Counterpoint Research data cited by CNBC, 1.26 billion smartphones shipped in 2025, up around 3% from the prior year — a far cry from the explosive growth that defined the category's first decade. Amon's contention is that the next growth vector runs through wearable AI hardware, and Qualcomm intends to be inside it.

"All the devices that we wear become endpoints for agents, and those AI companies understand they have to win those endpoints from agents," Amon said.

Amon also pointed to smart glasses as a bellwether. He told CNBC that smart glasses shipments are now in the "order of multiple tens of millions" per year, and predicted that within "a couple of years" that figure could reach the "order of hundreds of millions" — potentially becoming as large as the smartphone market. Companies including Meta and Samsung are developing smart glasses with cameras, which Amon cited as evidence of the broader hardware shift already underway.

Microsoft's Project Solara: An Agent-First Platform Built on Qualcomm Silicon

Qualcomm's ambitions in the post-smartphone space are not limited to reference designs. The company is also a key technology partner in Microsoft's Project Solara, an agent-first device platform unveiled at Microsoft Build 2026 on June 2. According to GeekWire, the platform is built on Android rather than Windows, features two working hardware reference designs, and already has an initial set of companies lined up to run pilots — including CVS Healthcare, Best Buy, Target, and AccuWeather.

One of those hardware reference designs, described by urdesignmag and TUAW, is a reimagined workplace access badge: a device with a touchscreen, fingerprint sensor, camera, 5G connectivity, and Qualcomm wearable silicon inside. The intent is for manufacturers to license these reference designs and build their own agent-first hardware on top of them, rather than Qualcomm or Microsoft manufacturing consumer devices directly.

Qualcomm's official blog describes the company as a "key technology partner" for Microsoft in enabling what it calls a chip-to-cloud vision — where silicon, software, and cloud infrastructure come together to power AI experiences. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella framed the broader purpose of the platform at Build 2026.

"That's what we're trying to get done with Project Solara, so that you, as developers and enterprises, have the flexibility to imagine the form factors that you want and have your agents be ubiquitous," Nadella said.

Dino Bekis, Senior Vice President for Personal and Wearable AI at Qualcomm, also weighed in on the significance of the collaboration, stating that "Microsoft's Project Solara is an important step in advancing agent-first experiences across" the wearable device ecosystem.

Beyond Project Solara, Qualcomm has also announced its AI200 and AI250 accelerators, targeting large-scale AI inference workloads in data centers. Built on Qualcomm's proprietary Hexagon NPU architecture, the AI200 is scheduled for commercialization in 2026, with the AI250 following in 2027, according to Futunn. This signals that Qualcomm's AI hardware ambitions extend beyond wearables and into the infrastructure layer that powers the agents themselves.

A Reported $8–10 Billion Bid for Tenstorrent Signals Deeper AI Chip Ambitions

On the same day as Amon's CNBC interview, The Information reported that Qualcomm is in negotiations to acquire AI chip startup Tenstorrent for between $8 billion and $10 billion. The talks are ongoing, and multiple outlets including Benzinga, Seeking Alpha, and The Register note there is no certainty a deal will be reached.

Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 by semiconductor veteran Jim Keller and focuses on developing efficient chip designs tailored for AI workloads, according to Gurufocus. A deal at the reported valuation range would represent a significant premium over Tenstorrent's last known valuation and would mark one of Qualcomm's largest acquisitions in recent memory. Qualcomm's market cap stands at approximately $237.6 billion as of June 16, 2026, according to Gurufocus.

If completed, such an acquisition would place Qualcomm in more direct competition with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel in the dedicated AI accelerator market — a segment that has become one of the most fiercely contested in the semiconductor industry. It would also complement Qualcomm's existing Hexagon NPU work and its edge-focused AI chip roadmap with expertise in AI workload-optimized silicon from a team with a distinct architectural approach.

Markets responded positively to the confluence of announcements. Qualcomm's stock gained approximately 4% on June 16, 2026, according to Benzinga.

Why This Matters: The Platform Battle for the Agent Era

Qualcomm's moves on June 16 are best understood as a coordinated positioning effort ahead of what could be a major platform transition in consumer technology. The smartphone era was defined by a small number of hardware platforms — primarily iOS and Android — and the chip suppliers that powered them. Qualcomm, with its Snapdragon line, became a dominant force in that ecosystem.

The question the company is now answering publicly is: what does the next platform look like, and how does Qualcomm ensure it is inside it? The answer, based on everything Amon said on June 16, is that the next platform is distributed across many form factors — glasses, earbuds, pins, jewelry, watches — unified not by a single device but by AI agents that operate across all of them.

This is a higher-stakes bet than it might appear. The 40-plus device designs Qualcomm is supporting are not Qualcomm products — they are designs that third-party manufacturers are building with Qualcomm silicon. The company's strategy is to be the enabling layer, the way Snapdragon became the enabling layer for the Android phone market. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether agent-first wearables achieve mass-market adoption at the scale Amon is projecting.

Qualcomm's deal with Snap Inc., inked in April 2026 and reported by Benzinga, to power future generations of Snap's "Specs" smart glasses with Snapdragon system-on-a-chip solutions, provides one concrete data point that the wearables pipeline is real and moving. Project Solara enterprise pilots at companies like CVS Healthcare and Target provide another. But the gap between early pilots and the "hundreds of millions" of smart glasses shipments Amon is projecting remains substantial, and it would be premature to treat that outcome as assured.

The potential Tenstorrent acquisition adds a separate dimension. Acquiring a dedicated AI chip design company would give Qualcomm capabilities beyond its current edge-focused silicon, potentially allowing it to compete at the infrastructure level where AI agents are trained and served — not just at the wearable endpoint where they run.

For now, these remain reported talks with no confirmed outcome. But combined with everything else announced on June 16, the direction of travel is clear: Qualcomm is building toward a world where it powers not just the device in your pocket, but every piece of hardware you wear, and potentially the data center infrastructure behind the AI that runs on all of it.

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