So, you know Qualcomm (QCOM), right? The company that makes the brains for most of the world's smartphones? Well, its CEO, Cristiano Amon, is looking at a future where the company's chips might be powering something even more interesting: robots.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Amon laid out a pretty clear timeline. He told CNBC that he believes robotics will "start to get scale within the next two years" and become "a larger opportunity" for Qualcomm in that timeframe. This isn't just a side project; he's positioning it as the company's next major growth engine as it looks beyond the increasingly tricky smartphone market.
Qualcomm's playbook here is familiar. In January, the company introduced a new robotics processor under its Dragonwing brand. The idea is to create a chipset platform that can run across many different types of robots—industrial arms, delivery bots, maybe even the humanoid robots Tesla (TSLA) and others are working on. It's the same strategy that made Snapdragon the go-to chip for phones from Samsung to Xiaomi: build a versatile platform and let everyone build on top of it.
Why now? Because robots are finally getting smart enough to be useful outside of highly controlled factory floors. Amon pointed to recent leaps in AI, what he calls "physical AI," as the game-changer. "People have said just robotics alone could be a trillion-dollar opportunity in terms of market size … the reality is, we see now, because of physical AI, robots have become a lot more useful," he said.
He's not the only tech CEO eyeing this prize. Nvidia's Jensen Huang has also flagged robotics as a huge future market. And the numbers analysts are throwing around are, frankly, astronomical. McKinsey estimates the general-purpose robotics market could hit $370 billion by 2040. RBC Capital Markets goes even bigger, forecasting a total addressable market for humanoid robots of $9 trillion by 2050. Whether those specific forecasts pan out, the direction is clear: a lot of smart money thinks machines are about to get a lot more autonomous.
Of course, this big bet on the future comes as Qualcomm deals with some bumps in the present. The company's shares were down over 2% in premarket trading Tuesday. The negative sentiment stems from a warning Qualcomm issued: the insane demand for high-bandwidth memory to power AI data centers is sucking supply away from the consumer electronics market. This is intensifying an already tight memory market and creating shortages that hurt Qualcomm's core smartphone business. It's a classic case of one tech trend (the AI boom in data centers) creating a headwind for another (smartphones).
So, the story here is a chipmaker at a crossroads. It's navigating supply chain headaches in its established business while making a very public, very specific bet on what comes next. Amon isn't just dabbling in robotics; he's giving it a two-year deadline to start pulling its weight. If he's right, Qualcomm could be powering the next wave of intelligent machines. If not, well, investors will want to know what Plan C is.
