San Diego, May 7, 2026, 09:06 PDT
Qualcomm surged $21.36 to finish at $213.93 on Thursday, up roughly 11%. Investors appeared to circle back to the idea that the smartphone-chip giant could be a lower-priced entry to AI hardware. Shares touched $223.58 at their peak, giving the company a market cap near $229 billion.
This shift is grabbing attention as Qualcomm offers investors something fresh outside of smartphones. A top hyperscaler — that is, a big cloud player purchasing hardware in bulk — is slated to get first deliveries of Qualcomm’s custom chips later this year. Investors should expect further specifics at the company’s June 24 investor day.
That disclosure has quickly become a talking point on valuation among investors. On Thursday, Harsh Chauhan at The Motley Fool pointed out that Qualcomm’s dependence on smartphones has kept it trailing other chip stocks, but he argued that AI inference chips — those that handle the actual running of trained AI models — might open up new growth opportunities for the company.
24/7 Wall St. took a bolder stance, pointing out Qualcomm is trading at roughly 16 times forward earnings with a free-cash-flow yield of 6.52%. Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD all fetch much steeper valuations. The piece claims investors are still treating Qualcomm like an old-line modem maker, not pricing it as an AI silicon player.
Simply Wall St., via Yahoo Finance, took a more circumspect approach: after Qualcomm’s 24% gain this week and a 47% surge over the past month, is the stock now fully accounting for expected growth, or is it still undervalued? The piece referenced the popular fair-value argument for $300 per share, but flagged risks tied to only modest revenue growth and softer net income projections.
Qualcomm’s figures offer ammunition on both sides. Fiscal Q2 revenue landed at $10.6 billion, with non-GAAP EPS at $2.65—this adjusted metric leaves out certain accounting factors. The chipmaker highlighted record QCT Automotive revenue and reported a 20% jump in combined automotive plus IoT revenue. Share buybacks? $5.4 billion for the first half of fiscal 2026.
Chief Executive Cristiano Amon described the customer as a “large hyperscaler” and talked up Qualcomm’s plans for a “multi-generation engagement.” He told analysts the company now has CPU, accelerator, and custom ASIC offerings—those ASICs being chips tailored for particular customers or workloads. The Motley Fool
Competitive dynamics are shifting quickly. Nvidia still sets the standard for AI chips. AMD’s fresh guidance this week ignited a worldwide surge in semiconductor stocks, and Broadcom stands out as a go-to for custom silicon. On Wednesday, Reuters reported AMD jumped 14.9% and the Philadelphia semiconductor index reached an all-time high, with Qualcomm picking up 1.6% that day.
That sets a tougher challenge. “Building from a small base,” Qualcomm is already expanding its data-center lineup, Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, told Reuters. He said that points to a “maturation” in the company’s strategy. Reuters
The handset segment remains Qualcomm’s big question mark. The company projected revenue between $9.2 billion and $10 billion for the current quarter, falling short of Wall Street’s targets. Smartphone makers are also feeling the squeeze from pricier memory chips, and Apple’s push to develop its own modem chips could threaten a major revenue source for Qualcomm. J.P. Morgan analysts, speaking to Reuters, put it bluntly: the smartphone sector is “hardly out of the woods.” Reuters
June 24 marks the next major hurdle. For the valuation gap to close, Qualcomm needs to deliver customer names, revenue figures, and evidence that its automotive and data-center chips can really balance out handset swings. Otherwise, Thursday’s rally is just buyers gambling on a business Qualcomm is only beginning to put numbers behind.
