Qualcomm is finally getting serious about AI infrastructure, but its push into the datacenter hinges on the success of an ambitious near-memory compute architecture designed to deliver better inference economics than today’s GPUs.

Announced during its 2026 investor day last week, the tech will see Qualcomm stack layer upon layer of DRAM on top of its XPUs to form a single unified compute and memory module it’s calling high-bandwidth compute (HBC).

“We offer all of the performance advantages of SRAM, but with the density and the memory capacity that HBM (high-bandwidth memory) stacks offer,” Tony Pialis, Qualcomm’s EVP of datacenter, claimed during last week’s investor presentation.

This technology is set to launch next year as part of Qualcomm’s AI250-series of Dragonfly rack systems, and marks a distinct shift in Qualcomm’s AI infrastructure strategy. The handset giant is no stranger to AI accelerators. Essentially every Snapdragon processor sold today ships with an NPU on board. But in the datacenter, the company has struggled to garner the same excitement as Nvidia, AMD, and even startups like Cerebras.

Compared to the big two’s GPUs, Qualcomm’s AI-series accelerators haven’t compared that favorably, but that could soon change as the company looks to make its mark on the datacenter.

With the AI250, the SoC maker is claiming 768 GB of memory capacity and up to 133 TB/s of effective memory bandwidth per card. For reference, Nvidia’s Groq 3 LPUs offer just 500 MB of SRAM and 150 TB/s of bandwidth.

If that seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Qualcomm is leaning heavily on the word “effective.” We know that because for the AI200-based Dragonfly systems rolling out this year, they claimed 414 TB/s of “effective” memory bandwidth across all 56 chips. On its face, that seems more realistic, but actually achieving that with 8800 MT/s LPDDR5x alone would require a 6,720-bit-wide bus, which it almost certainly does not possess. 

Qualcomm insists that this is the “pure physical bandwidth of the LPDDR interface,” but declined to offer any specifics as to how it’s somehow managed to achieve what Nvidia needed eight HBM3e stacks to do.

In any case, according to Qualcomm’s marketing materials, with the move to HBC, the AI250 will offer 18x the effective bandwidth of the AI200, while the forthcoming AI300 will deliver 54x the bandwidth. Given the context, these seem like outlandish claims, but these “effective” multipliers are really a feature of Qualcomm’s HBC architecture.

Unpacking high-bandwidth compute

Amplifying “effective” bandwidth isn’t the only party trick from these HBC-based accelerators. Qualcomm claims that by moving some of the XPU’s compute under the DRAM, it can significantly reduce the amount of power its chips consume.

On a conventional datacenter GPU, data is rapidly shuffled between HBM and the compute dies. Even using advanced packaging technologies like TSMC’s CoWoS, the power required to move this data back and forth is significant.

By stacking the DRAM directly on top of some of the logic and connecting them using through-silicon vias (TSVs), the path from compute to memory is shortened considerably.

“Imagine working in the same building that you live in so you only travel up and down,” Pialis said. “What does that mean for the highways and the roads that connect the suburbs to the city? Guess what? The roads are clear. The value this brings to the industry is lower power consumption, less heat, and that expensive road of silicon interposer that HBM solutions use is no longer needed.”

Performing bandwidth-bound operations on the base die also has the benefit of reducing the amount of data that needs to be shuttled to and from the HBC to the SoC. In effect, memory bandwidth is amplified. This is why Qualcomm is using “effective bandwidth” so liberally.

Compared to doing all of that work on a conventional GPU or XPU with distinct HBM and compute dies, the effective bandwidth would be significantly higher, which also achieves better density than SRAM-only designs, like Nvidia’s LPUs or Cerebras’ dinner plate sized accelerators.

With that said, Qualcomm probably won’t be running its entire AI software stack on HBC. Higher memory bandwidth primarily benefits decode, when the entirety of the model’s active weights are streamed autoregressively from memory one token after another. 

Decode isn’t particularly compute-intensive. As such, doing decode partially or entirely in HBC starts to make a lot of sense because it also avoids the thermal constraints associated with burying the compute under multiple layers of DRAM.

Qualcomm tells us that the AI250 can be used as a standalone AI accelerator, but notes it is heavily optimized around addressing bandwidth bottlenecks. So, in addition to being a dedicated inference chip, it can be used in disaggregated inference architectures that use GPUs or other Qualcomm parts for prompt processing and the AI250 to speed up memory intensive decode operations.

Peak FLOPS are notably missing from Qualcomm’s AI250 disclosures — the company declined to share specifics upon our request.

Is HBC actually a competitive advantage?

While Qualcomm is early among chip designers to make a fuss about near-memory or HBC, it’s not the first, nor is the technology beyond the means of Nvidia or AMD.

In fact, both Nvidia and AMD are rumored to be working with HBM suppliers and TSMC to develop custom base dies to boost the performance of their next-gen chips, though it’s still not clear how much, if any, compute has been integrated into them.

Qualcomm tells us its HBC “uses LPDDR memory in a purpose-built near-memory computing architecture that combines compute and highly-accelerated memory bandwidth within a 3D-stacked silicon design. While both HBC and HBM use stacked-memory concepts, HBC is a distinct architecture designed to address AI’s data-movement bottleneck by bringing compute and memory closer together, increasing memory bandwidth efficiency and improving energy efficiency for AI inference workloads. HBM has more stacks of DRAM, uses 2.5D interposer to route more wires, and does not do computing in the base logic die.”

AI chip startup d-Matrix is also developing accelerators that will use 3D stacked DRAM to extend their in-memory compute capabilities.

The underlying technology described by Pialis may not be as unique as Qualcomm would like investors to believe, but it shows the company hasn’t missed the boat.

However, Qualcomm’s ability to work with Nvidia and AMD may end up doing more to sell customers on its tech than anything. As we previously wrote, in a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy.

Qualcomm finds its Mojo

In addition to teasing its upcoming AI250 and AI300 accelerators, Qualcomm’s investor day also coincided with the acquisition of AI software startup Modular.

Modular was founded by Tim Davis and Chris Lattner, the latter of whom you may recognize as the creator of LLVM, Clang, the Swift programming language, and the multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR) compiler infrastructure.

At Modular, Lattner and crew developed Mojo, a low-level programming interface for GPUs, which offered a high-performance alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA or AMD’s HIP and ROCm stacks. The big idea is that users should be able to write highly performant AI apps that’ll run regardless of the underlying hardware.

For Qualcomm, Mojo presents an opportunity to sidestep the CUDA moat, which has dogged AMD for so long. With Mojo, Qualcomm’s customers won’t need to choose one platform; they can develop their apps and run them on whatever compute is handy at the time.

It’s not all or nothing either. Modular should help to support heterogeneous deployments similar to what Nvidia is doing with Groq’s LPU tech, where GPUs might be used for prefill and AI250s are used for decode in whatever ratio makes the most sense for that specific application.

However, the acquisition doesn’t just buy Qualcomm a vendor-neutral programming model. The folks buying these systems are primarily concerned with one AI workload in particular: LLM model serving. For this, Modular developed a serving platform called Max. Max is a bit like SGLang or vLLM in that it’ll run interchangeably on AMD or Nvidia hardware, but because it’s built atop Mojo, it, at least in theory, shouldn’t require nearly as much hand tuning.

The offering should help Qualcomm compete in a landscape where software has become even more important than the hardware it runs on, if it manages to close the acquisition this year without regulators stepping in.

In any case, we won’t have to wait much longer to see the HBC in action. After launching its AI200-series racks later this year, Qualcomm plans to push its first-gen HBC-based AI250 out the door beginning in 2027, while its second-gen HBC platform is slated for 2028.

While you wait, why not read up on Qualcomm’s new datacenter CPU, which we explored in more detail last week. ®

Co-hosts Mexico will aim to end their 40-year wait to win a World Cup knockout match when they face Ecuador in Mexico City, and you can live stream the game around the world for free.

Javier Aguirre’s men arrive in the last 32 of the FIFA World Cup 2026 high on confidence, after topping Group A with three wins from three. Yet the first knockout round has proved an insurmountable hurdle for El Tri for four decades, having fallen at that stage at seven successive World Cups from 1994 to 2018 and not making it out of the group in 2022. The only other time they’ve won a knockout game? In 1986, when they last hosted. Mexico are yet to concede this tournament and another clean sheet from Cesar Montes & Co would go a long way to helping them claim a milestone victory in front of the passionate home crowd at the Estadio Azteca.

The 2026 Workplace Trends Report highlights how companies, their leaders and employees are more selective in their expectations.

Morgan McKinley has published the results of its global 2026 Workplace Trends Report, which explores employee sentiment in comparison to evolving workplace expectations. 

To gather the data, Morgan McKinley collected information from 2,799 globally dispersed respondents, representing a diverse cross-section of the workforce, as well as 214 employers and decision-makers. What was discovered is that there is somewhat of a disconnect between employee goals and the expectations of the employer. 

The report found that globally, nearly half of employees are preparing to move jobs as their pay stalls and concerns over job security, restructuring and automation grow. Nearly 50pc of employees who contributed to the research said that they have serious plans to look for a new job in the next six months, despite 63pc of employers saying that they have no planned headcount reductions for 2026.

More than one-third (37pc) of participating employees are of the opinion that their role has the potential to be affected by restructuring, automation or cost-cutting and as many as 85pc of people agreed that if they felt their job was at risk, they would start applying for new roles. Meanwhile, nearly 70pc revealed that they had not received a salary increase in the past six months. 

Skills and retention

Interestingly, almost 65pc of employees said that they would aim to develop new skills or certifications in response to fears around retaining their role. 70pc of employees listed AI and data skills as among the top most important skills, despite more than half (56pc) being of the opinion that their employer is not investing enough in professional development.

This was significantly higher than the demand for leadership and management skills (49pc) or additional technical certifications (27pc).

Encouragingly, however, the report indicated that participating employers intend to support retaining and developing existing talent. 

Three-quarters said that they would prioritise redeployment and reskilling in response to workforce reductions, ahead of increasing their automation or AI adoption (38pc) or relying on temporary staff and contractors (25pc).

In terms of the skills gap, only 14pc said that they would address it by utilising automation. 

According to the report, this suggests that “many organisations recognise the importance of supporting employees through periods of change, reinforcing a culture that values people development and internal opportunity”.

Keep it moving

Irish employees were more likely than the global average to say their employer is investing enough in their professional development, at 29pc compared with 23pc globally. However, this still means fewer than one in three employees in Ireland believe enough is being done to support their career growth.

Also, specifically in Ireland, the report found that flexibility remains a major factor in career decision-making. Some 73pc of employees in Ireland said flexible work availability influences whether they accept or decline a role, compared to 64pc globally.

Commenting on the findings of the report, Trayc Keevans, the global FDI director and head of research at Morgan McKinley said: “The risk for employers is that they confuse a stable workforce plan with a settled workforce. Employees are reading the signals around pay, progression, AI, skills and flexibility. When those signals are unclear, confidence drains and people start looking.

“The findings show a workforce that is alert to change. People are not necessarily panicking, but they are preparing. If pay is flat, if roles are changing and if AI is being introduced without clear explanation, employees will naturally ask where they stand and whether their future is better protected somewhere else.

“For Irish employers, the message is clear,” she added. “Flexible work and career development are now part of the confidence test. Fewer than one in three Irish employees believe their employer is doing enough to support their professional development. That should concern any organisation trying to hold on to talent.

“Retention is no longer just about staffing levels. It is about whether people believe there is a future for them in the organisation. Employers that are clear on pay, honest about change and serious about skills will be in a much stronger position than those relying on stability alone.”

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