Qualcomm plans China-specific data center chips — new Dragonfly lineup will include nerfed AI accelerators that comply with export thresholds
Qualcomm has announced that it will bring all four of its Dragonfly data center product lines to China, including custom AI accelerators engineered to stay below U.S. export thresholds, CEO Cristiano Amon told Nikkei Asia on the sidelines of the company’s investor day in New York on Wednesday. China supplied 46% of Qualcomm’s revenue in 2025, almost all of it from smartphone silicon, and Amon’s data center plan could revive the same export-compliant strategy that cut Nvidia’s China accelerator sales to almost zero.
Dragonfly covers AI accelerators, data center CPUs, custom silicon, and connectivity chips, and Amon said versions of every line will ship into China within the export rules. “We have versions of all of our products that comply with those guidelines,” he told Nikkei Asia, adding that Qualcomm is “engaged in conversations,” presumably with Chinese customers. The first accelerator, the AI250, is due next year and uses the company’s HBC near-memory design instead of the HBM stacks that Nvidia and AMD racks rely on, a packaging choice that could pay off in a market where HBM is and will remain tight for the foreseeable future.
Qualcomm told investors that the data center unit is expected to generate $300 million this fiscal year and $5 billion in fiscal year 2027, figures the company designates as the early ramp of a total addressable market it projects will exceed $1 trillion by 2029. The push into China relies on Amon’s argument that Qualcomm’s existing relationships with Chinese phone makers and automakers extend to the data center, the same customer base behind its AI200 and AI250 inference accelerators announced last October.
China, however, isn’t a neutral buyer for Qualcomm at the moment: The country’s market regulator opened an antitrust investigation into its Autotalks acquisition in October, and has pressed domestic data center operators to source at least 50% of their chips locally while steering Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent toward Huawei and Cambricon parts.
Those dynamics have already gutted the export-compliant model that Qualcomm is looking to emulate. Nvidia’s H20, for example — the part it built specifically for China — had generated only about $50 million by late last year, and CEO Jensen Huang has said Nvidia has “zero” China market share left. Qualcomm is entering that lane voluntarily with hardware that won’t reach customers until at least fiscal year 2027, by which point Huawei’s Ascend line and Cambricon’s accelerators are scheduled to scale production well past current volumes.
Qualcomm has at least one confirmed buyer outside China, with Saudi Arabia’s Humain already taking delivery of AI100 systems and committing to 200MW of Qualcomm racks. Inside China, the company still has to convince customers that Beijing is pushing away from foreign silicon.
