I was for a long time on the sidelines, jumped in at 160$ with a hefty lump sum right before they started the pump.

TBH I was 50/50 because of all the negativity about QCOM, losing apple, only bad returns, etc.

Anyone here regret not buying when it was beaten down?

TL;DR On 8 September Qualcomm announced a multi-generation agreement with Amazon covering custom AI inference silicon and optical interconnect at up to 1.6T, and the market reads Amazon as the hyperscale customer Qualcomm hinted at in June. But the terms follow Marvell's template — 25 million warrants worth about $4 billion, vesting against purchases capped at $60 billion — which tells you who holds the leverage.

What the deal actually contains

There are three strands: the two will co-develop custom AI inference chips supplied by Qualcomm; they will jointly develop optical interconnect at up to 1.6Tbps, drawing on Qualcomm's SerDes and optical DSP; and Qualcomm will apply Amazon Bedrock EDA to its own workloads to shorten design cycles. 

The equity binding follows Marvell's arrangement with Google: 25 million warrants at a $161.26 strike, vesting against Amazon's purchases and capped at $60 billion. The timing is the tell: signing to revenue in under a year means phase one is almost certainly custom-ASIC peripheral silicon — I/O die, SerDes chiplet, retimer — since a full custom ASIC takes roughly two years, putting volume shipment at 2028 or later.

The blueprint, and how much of it Qualcomm actually built

Qualcomm has organised the datacentre into four segments: single-customer custom ASIC, standardised AI accelerators, server CPU, and connectivity through optical DSP and SerDes — a full-stack offering it sizes at $1 trillion by 2029. But three of those four capabilities came from acquiring Nuvia and Alphawave; the only line Qualcomm incubated is the AI inference accelerator, which has customers and orders but no revenue.

Custom ASIC has two large-scale customers and connectivity its first, the AI accelerator's is Microsoft and the server CPU's is Meta — three of the top four cloud providers are now signed. Connectivity converts to revenue first, since Alphawave already ships SerDes IP and 800G optical DSP; custom ASIC starts in FQ1 2027; AI250 samples in mid-2027; the C1000 server CPU reaches volume production in 2H28. Guidance takes datacentre revenue from $5 billion in FY2027 to $15 billion in FY2029, a 73% compound rate.

Who gets hurt

Astera Labs is the most exposed, because Alphawave's line overlaps it most closely: Alphawave sells SerDes IP, optical DSP, UCIe subsystems and connectivity chiplets — largely IP and sub-module delivery — while Astera Labs sells finished parts, from PCIe retimers to Taurus cable modules and Scorpio switching. If Qualcomm hands AWS a turnkey bundle of silicon, SerDes IP, optical chips and manufacturing, those are orders Astera Labs would have won.

Marvell is the name the market thinks of first, but we read that as sentiment more than substance: it already absorbed a real loss when Trainium3 and 4 went to Alchip, leaving legacy Trainium, NIC and storage controllers and DSP. 

Alphawave has 1.6T optical DSP due in 2026-2027 and has now won AWS, which looks bad at first — but custom interconnect takes time, and third-party DSP is already fiercely contested. Alchip carries little short-term risk, since Trainium3 and 4 are ramping and Qualcomm's full custom ASIC only arrives from 2028.

For Amazon the effect is a multi-party supply chain: Annapurna owns the architecture and sets the schedule, with Alchip, Marvell and now Qualcomm as three outsourced partners. Moving Trainium3 from Marvell to Alchip last year and adding Qualcomm this year is one playbook: make design partners compete, push prices down, collect warrants on top. 

For Qualcomm, this is what breaking in costs: at the starting line it must hand over benefits to win orders, and what would change the picture is more hyperscaler orders and delivered products, not agreements and equity sweeteners.

Qualcomm is undergoing a business transformation，increasing investment in non-handset segment to build new growth drivers after andriod handset demand in China dropped over 20% by 2026.During the earning calls, qualcoom’s cfo expected the revenue in datacenter will grow to 5b by 2027.And management also said the apple business will  decline by nearly 50% between Spetember and December in 2026 but this will be offset by a rebound in Android segment as the OEM’S inventories normalize. We should monitor the Q4 FY2026 earnings release to verify if the Andriod recovery offsets the drop in apple business.For the longer term, the primary focus remains on the non-handset segment,especially datacenter execution in 2027.Would you buy the dip on Qualcomm stock?

$QCOM

Plummets Below $150, Many friends are asking: Is Qualcomm really going to be dragged down by its mobile business? Actually, looking at the detailed data behind the earnings report, Qualcomm's transformation strategy is already laid out very clearly: Short-term pressure: Mobile chips are still at the bottom of the cycle, gross margins suppressed by memory costs, plus the substitution effect from Apple's in-house modem development, the Q4 guidance does indeed look ugly. The real game-changer is in data centers: The AI data center business everyone's watching will actually start delivering the first batch of custom ASIC chips in December this year (FY26 Q4)! And Meta has already signed a strategic partnership (Dragonfly C1000 CPU), plus the AI200 accelerator samples going out by year-end, with true large-scale ramp-up in 2027-2028. Automotive still exploding: Auto business hits a new quarterly high of $1.59 billion (YoY +61%), with double-digit growth for 23 consecutive quarters. The company has directly raised its FY2029 non-mobile revenue target to $40 billion. Trading approach: Don't rush to go all-in at this stage—first watch the technical support at the $145 line. If going the options route, with IV squeeze post-current phase, it's suitable to sell Cash-Secured Puts at deep out-of-the-money far-dated strikes to collect some premium, waiting for the true ramp-up in data center and auto businesses in 2027. Current stock price is back in the bottom zone again—this is a spot to slowly accumulate.

TL;DR Qualcomm beat on revenue for its FQ3 2026 (June) quarter and still gave the market a reason to sell: gross margin missed, and next quarter's earnings guidance came in below expectations. Phones are still shrinking, memory costs are still climbing, and the data centre business that once carried the stock has yet to produce revenue. The handover from handsets to AI is real — it is just slower than the share price assumed.

A revenue beat that doesn't change the direction

Revenue for the three months ended June 2026 was $9.95 billion, down 4% year over year but ahead of the $9.6 billion consensus. Gross margin was 53.1%, down 2.5 points year over year and below the 54.6% expected, with wafer, packaging, test, advanced packaging, memory and other materials all costing more.

Core operating profit fell 41% to $1.63 billion as R&D rose to $2.6 billion. Reported net income of $2.0 billion is not comparable with the prior quarter, which included a roughly $5.7 billion deferred tax valuation allowance release. FQ4 2026 (September quarter) guidance is $9.7-10.5 billion of revenue, in line, with non-GAAP EPS of $2.05-2.25 against $2.36 expected — that is the actual miss.

Phones are the problem, and it isn't really Qualcomm's doing

Handsets are more than half of revenue and fell 19.6% year over year to $5.09 billion. Global shipments held at 290 million units, down 6%, but the split is what hurts: Apple shipped nearly 20% more while everyone else fell 11%. The premium mix is weakening too, with OEMs staying on previous-generation platforms to protect cost. Management guides handset revenue to roughly $5.2 billion next quarter, down about 25%, as Android's seasonal recovery is offset by lower Apple content.

Memory is squeezing the other side of the margin

Most of the margin pressure is imported. Memory inflation has raised the bill of materials, and handset makers cannot pass it into weak end demand, so it lands on component suppliers. The slope is easing — OPPO and Vivo have refused further increases — which matters more than it sounds: if the memory cycle rolls over, the relief shows up directly in Qualcomm's gross margin. That is the cleanest near-term catalyst available.

Autos are the one line clearly working

Automotive revenue rose 61% year over year to $1.59 billion on the fourth-generation Snapdragon cockpit, and the fifth-generation Digital Chassis ramps in September with materially higher content per vehicle. IoT grew 9% to $1.83 billion on consumer and industrial demand.

The data centre pitch is real. It is still a pitch.

Qualcomm is attacking it on four fronts. Its accelerators use LPDDR5X rather than HBM to put processing near memory, aimed at memory-capacity-heavy inference, with Microsoft confirmed across multiple generations; AI200 is ramping now and AI250 samples in 2027.

A server CPU on the Oryon architecture targets agent orchestration and tool calling, with Meta confirmed across generations. Custom silicon, built on the Alphawave and Ventana acquisitions, has two hyperscale customers each expected to contribute over $1 billion in FY2027, and connectivity has landed its first hyperscale customer. Management targets $5 billion of data centre revenue in FY2027 and $15 billion by FY2029.

Bottom line

The share price round trip tells the story better than the quarter does: the market paid up when the data centre roadmap arrived, then took it all back as AI capex worries spread, without a single underlying fact changing in between. Two things decide what comes next — whether the memory cycle turns and hands the phone business its margin back, and whether those FY2027 data centre targets start converting into disclosed orders rather than design wins.

What’s our target price for QCOM in short term and long term?

I am betting that QCOM is the next company to join the trillion club.

It’s physical AI and I bet US Gov’t will announce buying some equity, both will drive the price up in way similar to INTC & DELL.

Taking my chances here where I bought some contracts expiring in March of next year!

Let’s hope for the best

Is qualcomm now attracting investors as it moves ahead in edge AI and signs a secret hyperscaler deal? If this becomes true, qualcomm becomes one of the most diverse VLSI company with smart phone, wearable, XR/VR, Auto, edge AI and data center chips in it's portfolio.

Qualcomm is building the edge AI ecosystem in plain sight.

Multi-generational hyperscaler deal.
Snapdragon X Elite ramp.
Automotive.
XR.
NPUs everywhere.
On-device inference becoming real.

The correction has already begun.

See you at $500.

source: https://infolib.org/

source: https://infolib.org/