Qualcomm Unveils AI200 and AI250 Chips for Data Centers

Qualcomm Technologies announced new artificial intelligence chips for data centers, expanding its business beyond mobile devices. The two chips, named AI200 and AI250, are designed for AI inference tasks and will be commercially available in 2026 and 2027.

The AI200 and AI250 are built for rack-scale systems with liquid cooling and can support full racks similar to those offered by Nvidia and AMD. Each rack is rated for about 160 kilowatts of power. Qualcomm said the chips focus on cost and power efficiency while supporting common AI frameworks and tools used in large language model applications.

The company stated that the AI250 uses a near-memory computing architecture to improve memory bandwidth and efficiency. Each AI card supports up to 768 gigabytes of memory, which Qualcomm said exceeds competing offerings. The chips are aimed at inference workloads rather than training, targeting cloud providers and enterprises seeking lower operating costs.

This announcement marks Qualcomm’s third attempt to enter the data center market after previous efforts with its Centriq processor and Nuvia-based designs. The company also indicated that it will offer the chips and components separately for hyperscalers that prefer custom rack configurations.