Qualcomm and Amazon have expanded their technology partnership to develop customised silicon and high-speed optical connectivity aimed at supporting the next generation of large-scale AI data centre infrastructure.
The multi-generational collaboration will focus on AI inference, with Qualcomm Technologies working alongside Amazon on customised silicon designed to meet growing demand for compute capacity, memory bandwidth and energy-efficient infrastructure.
The companies will also develop optical connectivity technology supporting speeds of up to 1.6T, alongside future-generation solutions. Qualcomm said its SerDes and optical DSP technologies would help address increasing bandwidth requirements within Amazon data centre networks as AI deployments scale.
The agreement strengthens Qualcomm’s push into AI data centre infrastructure, extending its power-efficient processing and system-level silicon expertise beyond its established mobile and edge computing businesses.
Qualcomm also plans to increase its use of AWS AI infrastructure, including Amazon Bedrock, for electronic design automation workloads. The company said the move could help shorten chip design cycles by applying AI to engineering processes.
Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated, said AI infrastructure would require advances across both computing and connectivity to improve performance and efficiency.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President, AWS, said the collaboration would combine customised silicon with advanced connectivity to deliver more performant, efficient and cost-effective infrastructure for customers.
The partnership comes as hyperscale operators increasingly pursue specialised silicon, faster networking and more efficient architectures to manage the escalating cost, power consumption and performance demands created by AI workloads.
It also highlights competition around the infrastructure underpinning generative AI.
