Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm, delivered the opening keynote at COMPUTEX 2026 in Taipei on June 1, laying out a vision in which 2026 marks the beginning of the end for the smartphone-centric technology world that Qualcomm itself helped build over the past two decades through its dominance in mobile chipsets. Amon has described 2026 as the “year of agents,” arguing that AI agents — software capable of autonomously carrying out tasks on a user’s behalf rather than simply responding to direct commands — will increasingly shift meaningful computing workloads away from smartphones and onto a new generation of purpose-built AI-first devices.
According to Fortune, Amon has revealed that Qualcomm is currently working on more than 40 distinct designs for new categories of AI-enabled devices, spanning smart jewelry, earbuds equipped with built-in cameras, wearable pins, and smartwatches — a notably broad and unusual set of form factors for a company whose business has historically been defined almost entirely by smartphone processors. Amon has also stated that Qualcomm is collaborating on secret, unannounced devices with “pretty much all” of the major AI companies currently racing to build hardware that could eventually reduce consumers’ dependence on smartphones as their primary computing device, predicting that meaningful workload migration away from phones could become visible by 2028.
Still Winning the Smartphone Business, For Now
Even as Amon pitches a post-smartphone future, Qualcomm’s near-term business results remain heavily tied to smartphone chip sales. Amon confirmed that Snapdragon chips power all six new devices Samsung unveiled at its 2026 Galaxy Unpacked event, extending a partnership that has made Qualcomm the dominant chip supplier across Samsung’s flagship Android lineup — a business relationship that continues to anchor Qualcomm’s revenue even as the company invests heavily in newer, less proven device categories.
Amon became Qualcomm’s CEO in 2021, and has spent much of his tenure pushing the company to diversify beyond its historical core business of smartphone modem and application processor chips into automotive computing platforms, PC processors under the Snapdragon X brand competing directly against Intel and AMD in the laptop market, and chips for extended-reality headsets and wearables. That diversification strategy has unfolded alongside an ongoing, well-documented licensing dispute between Qualcomm and chip design firm Arm over the royalty terms governing Qualcomm’s use of Arm’s underlying processor architecture — litigation that has continued in various forms across multiple jurisdictions and remains a live commercial and legal issue for both companies.
A Bet That Requires an Entirely New Hardware Category to Succeed
Amon’s “year of agents” framing carries real business risk for Qualcomm specifically, since the company’s diversification strategy depends on entirely new device categories — AI jewelry, camera-equipped earbuds, standalone AI pins — actually achieving meaningful consumer adoption, a far less certain proposition than Qualcomm’s decades-long, proven dominance in smartphone chips. Whether “agentic” hardware becomes a genuine mass-market category, or remains a niche alongside the continued dominance of the smartphone, is likely to become clearer only over the next several years.
Betting Alongside — Not Just Against — the Smartphone Giants
Amon’s pitch for a post-smartphone hardware future is notable precisely because Qualcomm’s current revenue still depends so heavily on smartphone chip sales to the same device makers, including Samsung, whose long-term product roadmaps Amon is simultaneously trying to shift toward entirely new hardware categories. That dual positioning — remaining the dominant smartphone chip supplier today while actively working to help build whatever eventually challenges the smartphone’s dominance tomorrow — reflects a deliberate hedge: if the shift toward AI-agent hardware happens as Amon predicts, Qualcomm aims to be supplying the chips inside those new devices too, rather than being disrupted by a category it did not help build.
Qualcomm’s ongoing licensing dispute with Arm has centered specifically on whether Qualcomm’s Nuvia-designed custom CPU cores, used in its Snapdragon X PC chips, are properly licensed under Qualcomm’s existing architectural agreements with Arm, a dispute that has proceeded through U.S. federal court with mixed rulings for both sides at various stages. That litigation runs alongside, rather than in place of, Amon’s broader diversification push, underscoring that Qualcomm’s expansion into PC chips, automotive computing, and now AI-agent hardware categories has required navigating serious legal friction with a key supplier even as the company pursues an ambitious new growth strategy.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Snapdragon chips are ubiquitous across the mid-range Android devices that make up the large majority of the Philippine mobile device market, meaning any meaningful shift in Qualcomm’s own product roadmap toward new AI-agent device categories will eventually filter down to affect what devices are actually available and affordable to Filipino consumers, many of whom rely heavily on remittance-supported purchases for major device upgrades. Philippine hardware, wearables, and IoT founders should also watch Qualcomm’s expanding portfolio of reference designs for new AI device categories closely, since Qualcomm’s chipsets and reference designs are frequently the foundation smaller regional hardware makers build their own products around rather than developing silicon independently.
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