Amazon Web Services has struck a multi-year deal with Qualcomm to develop customised silicon for AI inference workloads and 1.6 Tbps optical networking equipment, though both companies have released scant technical detail. The agreement, which could see AWS commit up to $60 billion in payments through to September 2036, marks Qualcomm's push into becoming a datacentre chip supplier and mirrors similar custom-silicon arrangements AWS already has with Intel and that Microsoft has with AMD.

On the compute side, the collaboration is expected to draw on Qualcomm's forthcoming AI250-series "Dragonfly" rack systems, which replace costly high-bandwidth memory with cheaper LPDDR memory paired with in-memory compute to ease inference bottlenecks; a new datacentre CPU, the C1000, is also due in the second half of 2028. The networking element is clearer: Qualcomm will supply serialiser-deserialisers and optical digital signal processors, likely stemming from its acquisition of Alphawave Semi, to push AWS's port speeds to 1.6 Tbps and address growing optical interconnect demands as AI clusters scale. In return, Qualcomm plans to expand its own use of Amazon's Bedrock platform for chip-design work.