Chip designer Qualcomm is significantly cutting its workforce.

A filing with the California Employment Development Department reveals that the company is cutting 1,258 jobs in San Diego and Santa Clara, California, in order to reduce costs.

The company is reported to have a workforce of around 50,000 employees.

Of the 1,258 set to lose their jobs, 750 will be engineers at a variety of seniority levels from director to technician. The rest will come from a range of roles, including internal technical staff and accounting.

The job cuts are set to begin in mid-December, 2023.

In August, Qualcomm's CFO Akash Palkhiwala told analysts that the company was looking to reduce costs after it was predicted to see revenue shrink by 19 percent in this fiscal year.

"We had previously communicated we would evaluate additional cost actions as the environment continues to evolve," said Palkhiwala. “Until we see sustained signs of improving fundamentals, our operating framework does not assume an immediate recovery."

The majority of Qualcomm's income comes from its chips designed for the phone market, however, demand for the product has proved insufficient.

Qualcomm's CEO Cristiano Armon is pursuing other markets for its chips. In 2021 the company acquired Arm server CPU startup Nuvia for $1.4bn, and despite a lawsuit filed by Arm seems to still be looking to test the chip in the server market.

In August 2023, the company teamed up with NXP, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, and Bosch to develop RISC-V hardware for the automotive, mobile, and Internet of Things sectors.

In October 2022, chipmaker Intel was reportedly planning thousands of job cuts which could see up to 20 percent of its workforce laid off. Similar cuts were made by Arm in March 2022, after the $40bn acquisition by Nvidia fell through.

The year since has seen broader job cuts across the tech sector.