Qualcomm will ship its entire Dragonfly data center lineup into China, including AI accelerators built to stay within U.S. export limits.
CEO Cristiano Amon confirmed Wednesday at Qualcomm's New York investor day that all four Dragonfly product lines — AI accelerators, data center CPUs, custom silicon, and connectivity chips — will ship into China under current export rules. China accounted for 46% of Qualcomm's total revenue in 2025, nearly all from smartphone chips, and the data center push is an attempt to convert those customer relationships into new revenue. The first accelerator, the AI250, arrives next year using a near-memory packaging approach rather than the HBM stacks Nvidia and AMD rely on. Qualcomm projects the data center unit will reach $300 million this fiscal year and $5 billion in fiscal year 2027.
The strategy is a direct echo of Nvidia's H20 approach — throttled hardware engineered to clear the same export thresholds — and that model has already produced grim results: Nvidia's H20 generated only about $50 million by late last year, and CEO Jensen Huang has said Nvidia now holds "zero" China market share, a function of Beijing pushing its largest cloud operators toward Huawei and Cambricon and requiring at least 50% local sourcing. Qualcomm enters with genuine Chinese phone and automotive relationships, but those don't automatically transfer when regulators are actively steering data center buyers elsewhere.
Qualcomm's China hardware won't reach customers until at least 2027, when Huawei's Ascend and Cambricon's chips are expected to be shipping in far greater volume — and an open antitrust probe in China over Qualcomm's Autotalks acquisition is still unresolved.