Qualcomm: $2.4B Alphawave Semi Buy To Boost Data Center Push

The deal to acquire London-based chip designer Alphawave Semi will ‘accelerate’ Qualcomm’s expansion into the data center market, particularly for AI inferencing, the company says, after confirming last month its plan to design and sell server CPUs again.

Qualcomm Monday said its $2.4 billion deal to acquire chip designer Alphawave Semi will “accelerate” the company’s expansion into the data center market, particularly for AI inferencing.

The San Diego-based chip designer unveiled the deal Monday, saying that Alphawave Semi’s high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies will complement its next-generation Oryon CPU and Hexagon NPU processors.

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The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals, the approval by Alphawave Semi’s shareholders and other conditions.

While Qualcomm has been selling its Cloud AI 100 processors for AI inference workloads in data centers for years, the company confirmed last month that it has wider ambitions in the market with a plan to sell server CPUs.

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s president and CEO, said the company’s “advanced custom processors are a natural fit for data centers” and indicated that the acquisition of the London-based company will also benefit it in other areas.

“The combined teams share the goal of building advanced technology solutions and enabling next-level connected computing performance across a wide array of high-growth areas, including data center infrastructure,” he said in a statement.

Tony Pialis, president and CEO of Alphawave Semi, said the combination of the two companies will “create a leading player in AI compute and connectivity solutions.”

“By combining our resources and expertise, we will be well-positioned to expand our product offerings, reach a broader customer base, and enhance our technological capabilities,” he said in a statement.

When Amon announced in May that Qualcomm plans to design and sell server CPUs again—after a failed effort several years ago—he said that the move includes a partnership with Nvidia that will allow the two companies to integrate their chips into new AI computing systems.

This integration will be made possible by a new silicon offering from Nvidia called NVLink Fusion that will let Qualcomm integrate custom CPUs with Nvidia’s GPUs to “build high-performance Nvidia AI factories.”

“We have some very interesting IP on CPU, especially a CPU change for the age of AI, and it’s really an AI-centric data center. You saw the great announcement from Nvidia today,” Amon said at Computex 2025 last month. “[The] CPU becomes very important, but also [in terms of] how we think about clusters of inference that is about high performance and very low power.”

At the time, Amon said Qualcomm decided to re-enter the data center market for a similar reason it decided to make a revitalized push in the PC market with its Snapdragon X Series chips, which debuted in PCs with Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC branding last year.

“PC was [an] already established market with established players, but if we had something unique and disruptive, there’s room for Qualcomm,” he said.