Until now, Qualcomm has been and is the great reference in mobile processors. But with this huge boom of artificial intelligence, no one can be left behind and lose their piece of the pie.
That is why they have decided to expand their horizons and this week they announced its entry into the data center AI chip market. With two new models, called AI200 and AI250, they want to stand up to the giants that dominate the sector right now: Nvidia and AMD.
These chips, which will arrive in 2026 and 2027 respectively, are built from the ground up to handle complex AI models in servers that can be liquid cooled.
How they have achieved this starts precisely from what they already have. They have taken some of the existing technology from their hexagonal mobile processors, with specialized AI units called NPUs, and adapted it for large-scale uses. The AI250, the most powerful, will have no less than 18 CPU cores and will be able to perform up to 80 trillion operations per second.
Qualcomm is going strong with 18-core chips and lots of memory
Remember this of its great strengths because yes, for AI it is necessary to focus on this aspect if it seeks to scale. Specifically, supports 768 gigabytes of RAM.
To give you an idea, this is already more than what Nvidia and AMD chips offer. But, if that were not enough, they promise these systems will be efficient in energy consumption.
Qualcomm will also offer these chips in different formats: from components for custom integrations, to cards to install in servers and complete racks to set up data centers ready to work. The idea is that each client can opt for a format and there are no gaps that are not covered where they can miss.
Currently, and despite not having yet gone on the market, it is already closing agreements with Humain, a company in Saudi Arabia that will use these systems on a large scale.
China does not want to be left behind either and seeks to checkmate the US
The war in the US and China has only just begun and no, this country is not going to sit idly by while the rest take giant steps in the field of AI.
That’s why A network of data centers powered by renewable energy is already being built in Beijing, designed to house tens of thousands of cutting-edge chips, many of them manufactured by Nvidia.despite the US ban on selling them to China.
With the idea of reducing its dependence little by little, on the one hand, it has developed its own semiconductor industry, which is increasingly powerful and which no longer has anything to envy of the rest of the world.
On the other hand, it has created a decentralized system of data centers that allows it to bypass limitations and democratize access to computing power throughout the country.
State companies such as Nyocor are leading the construction of these centers, and, for example, one of these centers will have more than 2,000 Nvidia H100 chips, one of the most powerful for artificial intelligence.
But be careful because The scale of this project is enormous. Some centers will have more than 100,000 chips, enough to train next-generation AI models. The curious thing is that, while Washington tries to block the arrival of these chips to China, the global market and distribution networks allow Chinese companies to obtain them in other ways.