At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon declared robotics the next ‘big wave’ of artificial intelligence, positioning the company to leverage its edge-AI expertise beyond smartphones and data centers. He highlighted that Qualcomm’s recent robotics architecture integrates hardware, software and ‘compound AI’ to enable real-world deployment of industrial automated mobile robots (AMRs) and full-size humanoids. The Dragonwing™ IQ10 Series processor, unveiled at the show, delivers up to 100 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI compute with power efficiency improvements of 30% over prior generations. Amon noted that existing partnerships with Booster and VinMotion—whose humanoid prototypes achieved over 10 hours of continuous operation on a single charge—demonstrate Qualcomm’s ability to scale robotics solutions across factories, logistics and service applications. He confirmed early discussions with Tier-1 industrial robot maker Kuka, underlining potential multi-year design wins worth hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate revenues starting in fiscal 2027.

Also at CES, Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon X2 Plus compute platform, built on 3-nanometer Oryon CPU cores and integrated AI accelerators delivering up to 60 TOPS of neural processing. The company said the X2 Plus will power a new generation of Windows AI PCs with performance gains of 20% and battery-life extensions of 15% compared to prior Snapdragon platforms. Qualcomm forecasts that AI-capable Windows notebooks will represent 25% of the sub-$1,000 laptop market by 2027, up from 8% this year, driven by OEM launches planned in the coming months by HP, Lenovo and Samsung. The platform’s combination of on-device AI inference for real-time language translation, background noise suppression and intelligent power management is expected to open new revenue streams beyond mobile handsets, with licensing and royalty contributions to Qualcomm’s QCT segment projected to grow at a mid-teens rate over the next two years.