Qualcomm Shares Surge 12%, Up 75% in a Month, as Wall Street Warms to AI Device Boom

Qualcomm shares climbed 12% on Friday and have now risen 75% over the past month, as Wall Street grows more attentive to the chipmaker's expanding role in the physical AI landscape — from smartphones and smartglasses to cars and robots.

The stock is trading at a record level, according to market data, reflecting a shift in investor sentiment toward Qualcomm's positioning in what analysts are calling the edge AI market — devices that process AI workloads locally rather than in the cloud.

"This company will be back in its former glory and will lead the connected device revolution," said Ivan Feinseth, an analyst at Tigress Financial Partners who rates Qualcomm a buy. Investors are "waking up to this fact," he said.

Qualcomm's chips already power Microsoft's Surface PCs and smartglasses from Google and Meta. Its Arm-based processors are positioned as an energy-efficient alternative to those made by central processor leaders Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

A new Stellantis deal is among the catalysts driving investor attention. On Thursday, the automaker announced it will deploy Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors to "support advanced, unified compute power across the entire vehicle, including cockpit, connectivity and advanced driver assist systems." Stellantis owns a broad portfolio of brands, including Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, and Maserati.

"Customers will be able to enjoy a smooth, immersive, and safe auto-drive experience on city and highway roads, with multiple driving modes to choose from," said Ned Curic, Stellantis' head of product development, at the company's investor day on Thursday.

The Stellantis partnership follows similar agreements Qualcomm has struck with Bosch, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and BMW. In its most recent earnings report, the company said revenue from its automotive business climbed 38% from a year earlier to $1.3 billion. More than 1 million cars already run their autonomous systems on Qualcomm processors, the company said.

OpenAI is also reportedly in discussions with Qualcomm to develop an AI chip that could power a coming device driven by AI agents. Feinseth described the forthcoming device as "a phone that will be an AI-based operating system that will do everything."

Friday's rally is also tied to investor interest in an entirely new segment for Qualcomm: data center chips. The company's forthcoming AI200 and AI250 are custom AI accelerators, announced last year, offering a more programmable architecture than the graphics processing units that Nvidia has used to dominate AI infrastructure spending. The chips are expected to go on sale later this year in a full rack-scale system, similar in concept to Nvidia's Vera Rubin and AMD's coming Helios system.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on the company's April earnings call that the company would begin shipping data center chips to "a large hyperscaler" within the calendar year. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the Computex conference in Taiwan on June 2 and host a Qualcomm investor day on June 24 — two events that could offer further detail on the company's data center ambitions.

Despite the recent momentum, Qualcomm has lagged behind Nvidia in the race to supply chips for training and running large AI models. Its strategy pivots instead on the proliferation of AI-capable hardware at the edge — a bet that the next phase of the AI cycle runs not through hyperscale data centers alone, but through the billions of connected devices people carry, drive, and wear.

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