Qualcomm is moving to cement its position as an AI infrastructure supplier in the data centre market. Qualcomm Technologies on Wednesday unveiled data centre-focused CPUs, AI inference accelerators, high-bandwidth computing technology and custom semiconductor solutions grouped under the Dragonfly brand at an investor day event.

The core product unveiled is the Qualcomm Dragonfly C1000 CPU. It uses the company’s in-house Oryon core and runs at more than 5 GHz. It has more than 250 cores and supports 2 TB/s connectivity based on PCIe Gen 7. Qualcomm said performance per watt is more than twice that of rival server CPU products. A commercial launch is planned for 2028.

New memory technology Qualcomm HBC (High Bandwidth Compute) also drew attention. HBC combines compute and memory on 3D-stacked silicon and is designed to reduce data-movement bottlenecks during AI processing. Qualcomm said HBC offers six times the bandwidth per watt of competing products and about 200 times the capacity per watt compared with SRAM. The AI250, which uses first-generation HBC, is scheduled for sample supply in mid-2027.

The third-generation AI inference accelerator, the Qualcomm Dragonfly AI300, uses second-generation HBC. Qualcomm projected effective memory bandwidth will rise 54-fold compared with the AI200. It said performance per watt is 4 to 8 times higher than GPU-based architectures. Commercial sampling is planned for 2028.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon (크리스티아노 아몬) said agentic AI is sharply lifting demand for AI inference within data centres. He said this is directly linked to Qualcomm’s strengths. He said the company has signed multi-year, multi-generation supply contracts with major customers through Dragonfly.

Qualcomm also said on Wednesday it signed a multi-generation data centre CPU supply contract with Meta. The C1000 will be installed in Meta’s next-generation server infrastructure. The company said more than 35 global firms, including Samsung SDS, SK hynix America, Micron, Lenovo and Super Micro, expressed support for Qualcomm’s data centre vision.