Qualcomm is partnering with an unnamed hyperscaler on the development of custom silicon.

The news was shared by CEO Cristiano Amon during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call on April 29, although he declined to provide any additional information about the customer.

“We’re very excited,” he said. “We’re really thinking about a multi-generation engagement. But I think that’s what we can say at this point.” He went on to note that initial shipments of the custom chips are slated for December, and that Qualcomm was planning to share more information about its data center expansion plans during its June investor day.

For the second quarter of FY26, Qualcomm posted revenue of $10.6 billion, with profits rising Year-on-Year from $2.81bn to $7.37bn. For Q3, the company is forecasting revenue of between $9.2bn and $10bn.

Qualcomm plots its data center comeback

Qualcomm withdrew from the data center market back in 2018 to focus on its smartphone efforts, but in August 2025, the company teased a return, with Amon saying the market “represents a new growth opportunity for Qualcomm and is a logical extension of our diversification strategy,” during its Q3 2025 earnings call.

At the time, Amon said Qualcomm was still in the “early stages” of its data center return, and has already engaged with multiple potential customers, with the CEO confirming it’s in “advanced discussions with a leading hyperscaler.”

In May 2025, the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Humain, the Saudi Arabian government's AI company, for the development of AI data centers, and announced that it was working on an unnamed server CPU, which will support Nvidia's NVLink.

In June of that same year, the chip designer announced plans to acquire Alphawave Semi for $2.4bn to support its data center comeback. The Toronto-based chip company develops high-speed wired connectivity and compute tech, creating IP, custom silicon, connectivity products, and chiplets focused on data transfer.

Amon’s latest comments came just over two months after Qualcomm announced it had appointed former SVP and GM of Intel Foundry Services Kevin O’Buckley as VP of global operations and supply chain. In January 2025, Intel senior fellow and Xeon server CPU chief architect, Sailesh Kottapalli, also left the US-based chipmaker to lead Qualcomm’s data center CPU unit.