At an investor event this week, Qualcomm unveiled its first server processor: With the Dragonfly C1000, the company aims to diversify its chip portfolio and enter the data center market. The processor is said to feature over 250 custom-designed ARM cores (Oryon) capable of exceeding 5 GHz. As is now common, it will be composed of multiple chiplets and will support PCI Express 7.0.
No current server CPU can do the latter, but the C1000 doesn't compete with those: it's not expected to be available until 2028. By then, AMD Epyc, Intel Xeon & Co. will likely have also adopted PCIe 7.0. Nevertheless, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon already presented a major customer: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to use servers with Dragonfly C1000 processors in his data centers in the future.
This is remarkable not least because, unlike other hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, Meta does not develop its own processors but buys them. Meta is therefore also the first and so far only customer for the AGI CPU, which ARM has developed and is having manufactured on its own behalf.
Full Roadmap
The Dragonfly C1000 is intended to be the final piece in the presented datacenter roadmap. It begins this year, but with other components: these are network components for data centers developed by the semiconductor company AlphaWave, acquired at the end of 2025. This means Qualcomm's datacenter division already has significant revenues booked in the current fiscal year.
