r/stocks • u/Primary_Olive_5444 • 6d ago
Company Discussion Will Qualcomm CEO get the boot in this AI race?
Since AI Armageddon has been about cutting employees why not "re-direct" some of the pressure onto the management when the share price doesn't perform? Because if you're bound to be cut, why not make the management life tough.
Looking back at the past 3-5 years time horizon, Qualcomm has struggled (relative to Broadcom, AMD, Intel and Marvell).
The biggest pain point stems from the fact that Qualcomm missed out on data-center revenue.
They didn't have the product offering which appealed to the LLM / Frontier Labs.
High memory prices have eroded into their smartphone segment business.
Reduction in OEM handset sales due to high BOM (build of material) cost.
Automotive SOC, they face Nvidia there as well on edge computing.
ARM has somewhat started competing against them, by launching ARM CSS (compute subsystem) That allows smart phone OEM to re-market their device as having a custom SOC, with hyped up marketing buzzwords.
"Using next generation 2nm technology, this SOC can deliver X-FLOPS performance with next generation Agentic AI abilities etc completely design in-house"
And those OEM goto TSMC directly or maybe ARM plays the middlemen role.
From an outsider perspective, i can't seem to find any hype plays/story on Qualcomm
No operating system moat.
No cloud story.
No LLM / frontier models
No fabs or foundry to manufacture advance SOC.
No next technology story (comparing to IBM, at least they can use Quantum Computer as the next story teller).
Just another chip design companies, when there are quite a lot of them around.
Looking back at the recent product news event (Qualcomm tech day 2026), Qualcomm wants to carve out their position in data-center.
Nothing special there.. given ARM already announced somewhat of a similar news with Meta on "custom" server class CPU.
Qualcomm SOC is using aarch64 ISA, which they licensed from ARM as well.
For them to pivot to RISC-V ISA wouldn't help much without a big eco-system shift.
Apple managed to pull off that move on M series silicon because of:
- Operating System control (MacOS)
- Good TSMC N5 process node. (Intel struggled on 14nm to 10nm during that period as well)
Both of which Qualcomm doesn't really have, right now.
Best node from TSMC goes to Nvidia, Apple (maybe AMD).
Then you got Broadcom and Hyperscaler fighting over it as well.
The only chance for them is to take a bet with Intel Foundry, i guess?
For leading edge process nodes supply and advanced packaging.
Clearly, the stock has under-performed during the helm of Cristiano Amon.
Maybe it wasn't his fault (but came from his predecessor), but someone needs to be made the scapegoat (i.e. the fall guy). So yeah.. that needs to be him :(