Qualcomm Stock To 2x To $370?

For three years, the AI rally left Qualcomm behind.

Nvidia (NVDA) soared. AMD rallied. Data center chipmakers captured practically every dollar of AI-driven gains. Qualcomm (QCOM) stayed a smartphone company, tied to a slowing upgrade cycle and a shrinking Apple (AAPL) relationship.

That story could now be changing.

Qualcomm stock has risen roughly 50% since mid-April. The move signals a bigger shift. AI is moving out of the data center and onto the device itself. Power efficiency, connectivity, and low-latency compute, the exact things Qualcomm has spent decades perfecting, are becoming the new currency of AI. If this transition plays out, Qualcomm stock has a credible path to double toward $380.

Shift Toward Edge AI 

Today’s AI ecosystem runs on centralized compute, with workloads concentrated in data centers powered by companies like Nvidia. That model doesn’t scale to billions of devices. Routing every inference through the cloud is costly, slow, and power-hungry. The next phase is local inference, running AI directly on the device. It’s faster, more private, and doesn’t depend on a live connection.

This shift plays directly into Qualcomm’s strengths.

For decades, Qualcomm has optimized for power efficiency and connectivity, the two constraints that define edge AI. Its Snapdragon platforms already sit inside smartphones, PCs, and a growing number of vehicles. Qualcomm’s automotive business alone represents a $45 billion design-win pipeline. Newer platforms like Dragonwing, along with partnerships across ecosystems such as Arduino, extend that reach into robotics and industrial AI. Qualcomm is evolving from a handset component supplier into a broader compute platform for connected, intelligent devices.

Power Efficiency 

Qualcomm’s strengths could extend beyond smartphones and into the data center itself. AI spending is shifting from training to inference, the process of running trained models in production. That shift is bigger than it sounds. Inference is projected to reach two-thirds of AI compute by 2029 and represent 80 to 90% of an AI system’s lifetime cost. Agentic AI systems that execute tasks, interact with software, and make decisions autonomously will only add to demand for efficient inference hardware.

Qualcomm’s chips are built for exactly this. Power efficiency and cost per query matter more than peak performance, and that focus is becoming more valuable as AI infrastructure runs into real power constraints. A large data center can be built in 12 to 24 months. Securing a high-capacity grid connection in key U.S. markets can take 36 to 84 months. Qualcomm’s advantage comes from decades spent designing chips for smartphones, where every milliwatt counts. Those same design principles could lower the energy cost of running AI workloads at scale.

Most AI accelerators from Nvidia and AMD rely on a specialized packaging technology called CoWoS, which combines computing chips with high-bandwidth memory. Demand for CoWoS has far exceeded supply, creating one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI hardware production. Nvidia has reportedly secured more than half of TSMC’s CoWoS capacity through 2026, leaving competitors to fight over the remainder. Qualcomm avoids this constraint entirely. Its AI200 uses LPDDR5X memory instead of HBM, allowing it to operate on a different supply chain and sidestep one of the industry’s most important manufacturing bottlenecks.

How Qualcomm Stock Doubles

Let’s run the numbers.

Qualcomm generated about $44 billion in revenue in FY ’25, and consensus points to about $42.6 billion in sales for FY ’26 due to the memory shortage, which could impact device shipments and Apple’s pivot away from Qualcomm modems. However, if revenue actually picks up at a rate of about 15% annually, led by AI, CPU chips, and automotive, sales could reach $65 billion by 2029. Even if we hold net margins at about 25% (just a notch above trailing 12-month levels), that’s about $16 billion in annual net income. With share repurchases likely to continue, we assume that share count could trend down from around 1.07 billion over the last quarter to levels of about 950 million by 2029. See how Qualcomm margins compare with peers

That would translate into an EPS of about $17 per share. Now let’s consider valuation. The broader semiconductor sector trades at more than 35x forward earnings, while Qualcomm is trading at just about 17x forward earnings. ^[1] Even a modest 22x multiple – which would reflect the potential AI growth story but still discount the stock relative to high-flyers – implies a $370 share price. That’s almost double today’s levels.

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1. NYU Stern [↩]