Dear Qualcomm Stock Fans, Mark Your Calendars for June 24

If you had to pick a leader in the semiconductor stock race, you’d be hard-pressed to name anyone other than Nvidia (NVDA). The famed chipmaker now sports a valuation of more than $5 trillion – the most of any publicly traded company – and its stock jumped by an impressive 1,160% over the last five years.

But the race isn’t over, and there are plenty of other companies poised to do exceptionally well in the coming years. Some of them, such as Qualcomm (QCOM), are even outperforming Nvidia in recent months. Qualcomm stock is up 62.74% in the last year, thanks to a huge increase over the last two months, outdistancing the 54.07% return of Nvidia over the same period, as investors realize that Qualcomm may have more opportunity in artificial intelligence than they initially believed.

Qualcomm stock began running higher when CEO Cristiano Amon disclosed that the company would begin shipping data center chips to “a large hyperscaler” this year. That was huge news for a company that had not been seen as a major player in the data center space.

And now Amon is raising the possibility that Qualcomm has another valuable opportunity in the expected massive increase in AI inference.

Qualcomm’s bread-and-butter has long been making chips for smartphones, connected cars, and personal computers. Speaking at the COMPUTEX 2026 conference in Taipei, Amon pointed out that AI agents are expected to be operating on six billion smartphones, two billion PCs, and a billion connected cars, robots, and other devices by 2030. This would push AI token generation from 31.7 billion tokens every 10 seconds today to 1.27 trillion every 10 seconds at the end of the decade.

It would open a huge opportunity for Qualcomm’s AI-compatible chips, as sending every AI request to a data center cloud environment would become too costly and slow. Instead, many AI chip requests will need to be handled closer to where data is generated, Amon said.

If so, that would be a powerful twin-jet engine to pair with Qualcomm’s emerging data center business. Enthusiasm about the latter is what has really been pushing Qualcomm stock up lately, as shares jumped 44.1% in the last month. Let’s take a closer look.

About Qualcomm Stock

Based in San Diego, Qualcomm is a fabless – meaning it doesn’t operate its own foundry – semiconductor company that makes chips for a variety of uses. The company’s Snapdragon processors are used in smartphones and PCs, and its Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform is in use by automakers for infotainment and driver-assistance systems.

The stock’s one-year performance far outshines the 27% return of the S&P 500 Index ($SPX), and has helped push Qualcomm stock to a market cap of $263.5 billion.

However, with the increase in stock price has come a sharp jump in the stock’s forward price-to-earnings Non-GAAP ratio. At the end of the first quarter, QCOM had a forward P/E of 11.7 times. Now, it is 23.16 times.

The stock also pays a quarterly dividend, with a yield currently 1.5%. Qualcomm has increased its dividend for 24 consecutive years, and the payout ratio is less than 36%, so investors can reasonably expect that quarterly payout to continue.

Qualcomm Beats on Earnings

Qualcomm managed an earnings beat in the second quarter despite a slight year-over-year (YOY) decline in revenue. Sales of $10.599 billion were down 3% from a year ago, and earnings of $2.65 per share beat expectations of $2.56 per share. The stock actually dropped 7% on the earnings release, as Qualcomm’s revenue forecast of $9.2 billion to $10 billion was below Street expectations.

But the market quickly put those fears to rest during Amon’s earnings call with analysts when he began talking about opportunities in the data center space.

“We’re pursuing multiple opportunities with large hyperscalers, cloud service providers, sovereign AI projects, and other global partners,” Amon said. “Building on that momentum, we're also entering the custom silicon, space beginning our ramp with a leading hyperscaler and we expect initial shipments in the December quarter.”

He wouldn’t disclose the customer but promised more details at Qualcomm’s Investor day on June 24. Amon also promised to unveil Qualcomm’s vision for incorporating its CPU products into upcoming data center products.

“I think when you think about agents, CPU becomes very important. And I will argue, we are one of the companies that have a pretty good CPU asset,” he said. “We've proven that CPU performance with leading performance on the markets that we are right now, such as PC, smartphone, and auto. And we have built – and we'll provide details on Investor Day – a dedicated CPU for agentic experiences in the data center. We're going to show the metrics; we're going to show how it performs. People will be able to compare. As you know, we have an architecture license, and we have a very, very high-performance CPU.”

What Do Analysts Expect for QCOM Stock?

Certainly, Qualcomm is going through a rerating right now as the company’s data center announcement is forcing people to take a second look at the stock. That’s why analysts have a consensus “Hold” rating on the stock, and why the mean price target is only $181.21, representing potential downside of 25.3%.

Analysts from three companies – TD Cowen, Rosenblatt, and Benchmark – all posted “Buy” recommendations after the company’s earnings report, with price targets between $190 and $225 – and even those have been surpassed in Qualcomm’s recent run higher. 

A lot is riding on Qualcomm’s investor day as Amon has set high expectations. He will face a lot of questions about Qualcomm's AI strategy, both with AI chips on devices and its attempt to establish a foothold in the data center market that has largely been dominated by Nvidia and other incumbents.

Qualcomm isn’t close to being a leader in the race to be the best semiconductor stock, but it has momentum. And a strong Investor Day presentation could reinforce investors’ newfound appreciation for Qualcomm stock.