Qualcomm says 2026 will be the year of AI agents

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at the annual Computex event in Taiwan that 2026 will be the "year of the agent," as AI shifts from prompt-based tools to autonomous systems that can plan, reason and act across smartphones, PCs, cars, robots and industrial equipment.

Amon said Qualcomm wants to support AI workloads across what he described as the compute continuum, covering CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and connectivity for use both on devices and in the cloud. He said Qualcomm can scale AI compute from sub-2 milliwatts in devices such as earbuds to kilowatt-level systems in data centres, and he identified battery life and latency as key engineering constraints.

Amon said 6G will be part of future AI architecture, describing it as the first wireless generation designed as an AI-native network connecting distributed intelligence across devices and data centres. During the event, Qualcomm also unveiled Dragonfly, its new data centre brand for inference workloads, and Amon said the company is already working with hyperscalers and global partners on deployments.