Qualcomm stock enters datacenter AI race with Saudi deal

Investing.com - Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) announced its entry into the datacenter AI market with two rack scale solutions scheduled for availability in 2026 and 2027, challenging market leader Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), which currently dominates the sector with a massive $4.64 trillion market cap and 71.55% revenue growth over the last twelve months.

The chipmaker also revealed a deal with HUMAIN, the Saudi sovereign AI initiative, for 200 MW of capacity in 2026, quantifying the letter of intent signed between the parties in May 2025.

Wolfe Research maintained its Peerperform rating on Qualcomm following the announcement, noting that the specifications released for Qualcomm’s product appear less robust than current offerings from Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom.

The Qualcomm solution will use LPDDR memory rather than HBM, and PCIe for scale up rather than Ethernet or NVLink, according to Wolfe Research’s analysis.

Without details on power consumption, performance metrics, and pricing, Wolfe Research estimates the HUMAIN deal could be worth approximately $1 billion, significantly less per gigawatt compared to AMD’s recent $15 billion per gigawatt deal with OpenAI.

In other recent news, Nvidia has been at the center of several significant developments. DA Davidson reiterated its Buy rating for Nvidia, maintaining a price target of $210, highlighting the ongoing focus on AI compute demand growth. Meanwhile, SuperX AI Technology Limited announced a strategic investment in MicroInference, a partner in the NVIDIA Partner Network, aiming to enhance its supply chain for advanced NVIDIA servers and networking equipment. This move is intended to meet the growing demand for full-stack AI solutions in the Asia Pacific region.

Additionally, Nvidia has partnered with Uber to advance autonomous vehicle development, utilizing Uber’s extensive real-world driving data to train foundation models. In another major development, Nscale signed a substantial deal with Microsoft for approximately 200,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs to build hyperscale AI infrastructure across Europe and the U.S., marking one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts to date. On a different note, President Donald Trump canceled plans to deploy federal troops to San Francisco after discussions with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other tech leaders. These developments reflect Nvidia’s expanding influence and strategic partnerships in the tech industry.

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