# Qualcomm wants data centers to be 30% of its business as phone sales slide

> With smartphone sales down about 20% from 2025, Qualcomm forecasts data center revenue rising from about $650M in early 2027 to $15B by 2029.

- URL: https://devisdead.ai/news/qualcomm-wants-data-centers-to-be-30-of-its-business-as-phone-sales-slide
- Published: 2026-11-04T23:54:12Z
- Author: DevIsDead Newsroom
- Section: Startups & Money
- Tags: qualcomm, data centers, chips, earnings
- Originally reported by The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1026867/qualcomm-earnings-data-centers).

Qualcomm built its empire on phones, and phones are having a rough year. With smartphone sales down around 20 percent from 2025, the company used its Q4 2026 earnings call to sketch a big move into AI data centers, Terrence O'Brien reports for [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1026867/qualcomm-earnings-data-centers).

The plan leans on partnerships with Amazon and Meta that Qualcomm announced earlier this year, and the forecast climbs fast: roughly $650 million in data center revenue in the first quarter of 2027, climbing to $5 billion by late 2027 and to $15 billion by 2029. For context, the whole company brought in $10.4 billion in 2026. The company says data centers should eventually be about 30 percent of its business.

That's modest next to AMD, which expects more than 80 percent of its revenue to come from data centers someday. But it says plenty about where chip money is heading. The phone in your pocket is becoming the side business; the rack running the model is the main event.

Details are thin. The Verge's report doesn't say which chips these are, what workloads they target or what the Amazon and Meta deals commit to, so read the 2029 figure as a forecast, not an order book.

One more caveat: this same week, voters in several states made new data centers harder to build. Every chipmaker's data center forecast quietly assumes the buildings actually get built.

**[Scoreboard](/scoreboard) update:** AI +1. AI servers replace smartphones as Qualcomm's growth story.

Stay undead.