Qualcomm just landed the kind of customer that turns a side project into a real business. Meta has signed on as the first major Big Tech buyer of Qualcomm’s data center CPUs, a deal that marks the chipmaker’s most significant step yet into a market it has been circling, and occasionally retreating from, for over a decade.
The multi-generation strategic agreement, announced at Qualcomm’s Investor Day in New York on June 24, centers on the Qualcomm Dragonfly C1000 CPU. Production is slated to begin in the second half of 2028, with the chip designed specifically for agentic AI workloads and optimized for high performance per watt.
From smartphones to server racks
The numbers tell the story. Qualcomm raised its fiscal 2029 non-handset revenue target to $40 billion. Of that, over $15 billion is projected to come from data center AI alone.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed the partnership around the company’s infrastructure buildout for what he called “personal superintelligence.” In practical terms it means Meta needs enormous amounts of compute that runs efficiently at scale. The Dragonfly C1000’s focus on performance per watt fits squarely into that requirement.
