Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon on AI smartphones, automotive agents, and acquiring Modular to open-source a CUDA alternative

Speaker 1: Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have the president and CEO Paul Coff, Cristiano Amon in the waiting room. Let's play Here we go. With TBPN UltraDome. Cristiano, how are you doing? Very

Speaker 10: good. How about yourself?

Speaker 1: We're doing fantastically. Where are you calling in from?

Speaker 10: From Maui, Hawaii. It's our Snapdragon Summit. This is day two.

Speaker 1: How how long have you been doing Hawaii? Why Hawaii?

Speaker 10: It's probably more than ten years. I think it's we have a lot of, you know, global press that come here from all of our countries, a lot of partners. Nobody complains about coming to Hawaii.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I can imagine. Yeah. It's a good place to be. What are the highlights? What are the messages that you're trying to drive home today and and with this conference?

Speaker 10: Look. At the Snapdragon Summit, we always announce our latest, you know, Snapdragon flagship processor for smartphones. But this one is it's special because for the past couple of years, we have been seen. We have a clarity of vision. We have seen how a smartphones are gonna change to an AI smartphone, and I think that's actually started to happen right now.

Speaker 1: Yes. What how does your business actually change in an era of folks wanting to do more on device inference and AI on something like an Android phone, one of your big partners? How how do you think you need to adapt? Is there something you need to change, or has this been years in the works you think you're ready?

Speaker 10: No. Years in the work. Look, we if you we were kind of a long time ago. It it feels like a long time ago when we're kind of showing, you know, multi billion parameter model running on devices. Look, there's this whole conversation about AI running on the cloud and on the edge, and people often ask the question, why the edge? Why the cloud? And I think that's probably the wrong question. It's almost I like to go back and and say, okay. Everybody, get their phone out of their pockets. Get your 200, 300 apps that you have, and let's go have a conversation about what part of your app runs on the device or runs on the cloud. And if you and I know Yeah. Even though we build incredible processors, if you put on airplane mode, you you don't use your phone. So at the end of the day, AI is no different than that. It's gonna be running on the device and on the cloud. It's gonna be all transparent to you.

Speaker 1: Yeah. How how are you viewing what the next couple years will look like in automotive? It feels like the demands for AI on device at the edge are even more important potentially, but maybe it's equally employ important. How are you seeing the automotive business develop?

Speaker 10: Well, automotive has been ahead of that. Like, we we've been very fortunate. Automotive was a new business for Qualcomm, and and we now serve all the car companies in the world. Mhmm. And what has been interesting about that is AI on the edge, actually, is being very big in automotive because of assisted driving and autonomous driving. That's kind of AI running on a processor in the car. But what's happening with the car right now is when you're behind the wheel and you don't have any legacy of OSs and apps, a genetic experience is very natural when you're behind the wheel. We also see now the fusion of the systems in the car that was designed for navigation, like the cameras, for example, being also being used for see what I see and have an agentic experiences. So, like, you know, people are in their car and they say, well, they guessed the agent. This restaurant on the right, what's the Yelp review and do they have availability for lunch right now? Those are kind of some of the experience we're seeing and that's accelerating for us.

Speaker 1: Got it. How are you processing the narrative around like the CPU crunch? We saw the the agentic era boom and, you know, there were the whole websites that were going down because so much code was getting pushed. It feels like agents like, the the the idea that everything would be done at the model layer on a GPU is not the way things are playing out. CPUs are incredibly important, especially in the data center. I'm wondering if, are we going to experience like another CPU crunch as we enter the era of like personal agents? Because we saw the effect that the enterprise agents and software coding agents had on the CPU demand. What does the next couple months even look like for CPU demand in the data center?

Speaker 10: Okay. Let me separate that conversation in two. I think one one topic is there's so much more demand for computes than availability right now and across the board. So I think what we've seen this right now and and by the way, as a semiconductor company, I'll tell you, the supply chain, it's operating at a 100% capacity. Everything everything is short because there's so much more demand than the availability of compute. Now the second part is, the way we see it, and we're just entering the data center, but we kind of see that also on devices of the edge. You the data center is going to have to evolve, and it's already on its way to do that into a terra genius compute. You have different engines to do different things. CPUs are going to be very important for orchestrator and agents and CPU demand will continue to rise and that's also true on the other side of data center phones. As those agents get deployed on devices, they have a lot of CPU demand. But you're going to have different engines for different things. Right? For example, for inference we see there's engine now for pre fill, engine for decode, decode attention, and so forth.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. How are you thinking about the changing landscape of consumer devices? I mean, Meta Connect is today. I'm sure that they're gonna announce some new consumer devices. But we talk to founders all day long that are building just, like, really cool, small robotics projects, wearables, devices. There's there's rings and and wristbands and ankle bands and anything you can wear or put on your body, it's happening. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that actually start to move up your to do list as like you gotta engage with that smaller community even though it might be nascent. And are you are you are you actually trying to engage with like the smaller device community on the consumer side at a conference like this?

Speaker 10: Look, David, and I'm gonna say this in all humility, but the majority of those new classes of devices are actually used in our chip. And there is no there's a there's a multitude of of those products now, and there's big companies and small companies. And the reason is because when you think about agents and agents are not bound by OSs or applications and and you have multimodal like think about glasses for example. I'm actually a big believer that glasses is going to see an inflection point. The glass is a prime real state close to your eyes, to your mouth, to your ears, your head turns, your camera see it. And then those things like see what I see, read what I read, hear what I hear are going to come up. But we've seen all sort of form factors. We've seen earbuds with cameras Yeah. Jewelry, pins, buttons, and and this is kind of the new personal AI category, and I think that would be a very big category.

Speaker 1: How are you grappling with the open source ecosystem versus closed source tooling to enable the next generation of devices to integrate? Mean, obviously, you've already won a huge portion of them over, but you want to keep that forever. Right?

Speaker 10: Oh. Thank you for asking this question. I think it's maybe a great opportunity for me to to make a plug about what we're doing with modular. So I don't know if you heard about what we're doing with modular.

Speaker 1: Tell them.

Speaker 10: Look, we made an acquisition of a company and it's a great team. It's the modular team. I think the founder is Chris Latner. I think he's probably a legend within the computer science world. He was the inventor of the Apple Swift programming language. He was the inventor of LVM. And he built a stack which is like CUDA, but it's designed to work on any hardware. Doesn't matter. You know, CPU accelerators, it will run on on NVIDIA, on AMD, on on Qualcomm, or on any hardware whatsoever. So we bought that company and we're making that open source. That's what we're doing because we actually believe that there the industry will benefit from an open source stack that scale from the data center across different hardware and the edge. And it doesn't matter. I'm gonna celebrate that stack in each and every one of my competitors because we probably need an open stack to to drive innovation in AI. Otherwise, it's just one company doing most of the innovation.

Speaker 1: Thank you. That's a very helpful explanation. We were just earlier in the show talking about Jensen Wong sitting down with Ezra Klein engaging with some of the very deep questions about AI jobs and existential risk. Is this something is this conversation that we're seeing bubble up in the public sphere actually making its way to the C suite of your customers that you engage with? Or are you sort of in a mode of put one foot in front of the other and let those conversations take place in other platforms? Have you been engaging with all these debates around slowdowns and open source AI versus closed source AI? It feels like every week there's a new big hot topic and meaty almost sci fi scenario to engage with. But what has your been has your approach been as the CEO of an important company in the space?

Speaker 10: Well, I wish we have like at least like half an hour to have this conversation. This is a very big topic. It's

Speaker 1: a very

Speaker 10: big topic. But look, in one minute that we have, I'm gonna try to maybe give you an answer.

Speaker 11: Solve the whole problem. Solve it all.

Speaker 1: The whole problem. One minute.

Speaker 2: In one minute.

Speaker 10: I think there's a lot of different conversations and look in any kind of changes. For example, in The United States, you see a lot of conversation about safety of the models. I I look. I think people will talk about safety in general and but they are they are very specific things. I think cyber security is actually a big one, and I think it's really important. It's important to have products that are done responsibly. I think that nobody's gonna nobody's gonna argue against that. Hey. Do you want me to build a product that is gonna go crazy? No. No. I don't want you to do that. Yeah. I think that's kind of a logical thing. And cybersecurity is actually a a serious issue. You know, there's a big surface area. But if you go to places like China, the conversation is very different. It's about putting AI in every car and every phone, every PC, every industrial and it's kind of very different.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It is. Yeah. We were talking about that how there's just such a wide gap in the discourse between the impact putting AI in all these little places and then you have like the bigger questions. But we'll get to that next time. We'd love to have you back on the show. We can spend a full hour solving

Speaker 2: thirty minutes we can get to the bottom.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Then we'll solve it. It will be solved. But congratulations

Speaker 2: calling in from your event.

Speaker 1: Thanks so much for taking a couple minutes today. Yeah. Great with us. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. You too. Great

Speaker 10: talking Thank to you you.