Weekly Muse-ings: QCOM Analyst Day Preview (Huge SAM Expansion vs. Meaningful Challenges Ahead)

Research evidence excerpt

Weekly Muse-ings: QCOM Analyst Day Preview (Huge SAM Expansion vs. Meaningful Challenges Ahead)

6 (Bytedance?) with a ramp towards more meaningful (multiple billions) revenue in CY27 and beyond.

While we applaud Qualcomm’s push into the XPU/Custom ASIC market, we simply don’t think this will be a walk in

the park. On the positive front, we do see the company’s compute architecture specifically built for low power

inference as a potential key positive vs. the more traditional characteristics of competitors’ expertise in connectivity,

packaging, and integration. We also view QCOM’s tier 1 relationship with TSMC as a clear necessity to play in this

market. The Alphawave acquisition is also an incremental positive, though we believe Alphawave’s SerDes simply

cannot compare to solutions offered by Broadcom and NVIDIA. Qualcomm’s know-how with heterogeneous SOC

integration can also help the company ramp fast in this new business. Finally, Qualcomm has world-class

semiconductor design engineers. On the other hand, we do see real challenges, including 1) Custom ASIC is a brand-

new muscle for Qualcomm, 2) Need to develop strong, multi-year hyperscale partnerships, 3) Go-to-market

strategy – hyperscalers need to believe in QCOM’s 5-year roadmap, and 4) Offering a proven software stack for

hyperscalers.

When we put it all together, we highlight 1) the total served available market is enormous, 2) we expect Qualcomm

to offer a very upbeat Data Center revenue outlook into FY31, and 3) we will take a wait and see approach on these

developments as announcing a customer is very different from developing a roadmap (both hardware and software),

co-developing silicon, and delivering product at scale at the right margin over the next 3-5 years. We are very early