Qualcomm Says 2026 Is the ‘Year of Agents,’ Unveils Dragonfly AI Data Center Brand

Key Points

• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said 2026 will be the “year of agents,” arguing that AI is shifting from chat-style prompts to autonomous systems that can act across phones, PCs, cars and other devices. He said this will require major changes in hardware, operating systems and apps.
• At COMPUTEX 2026, organizers framed AI as the industry’s central theme and emphasized broader ecosystem collaboration, with major focus areas including robotics, physical AI and complete system integration. The show is the largest in its history, with more than 1,500 exhibitors and 6,000 booths.
• Qualcomm also unveiled Dragonfly, its new brand for data center products, signaling a bigger push into cloud and edge computing. Amon said the company is already working with hyperscalers and partners, with more details due at Investor Day on June 24.

COMPUTEX 2026 opened in Taipei with organizers framing artificial intelligence as the central force reshaping the global technology industry, while Qualcomm NASDAQ: QCOM President and CEO Cristiano Amon used the event’s opening keynote to outline the company’s view of an “agentic” AI era across phones, PCs, cars, robots and data centers.

James Huang, chairman of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, or TAITRA, said COMPUTEX is taking place amid “two great waves”: geopolitical uncertainty and the rise of AI. Huang said this year’s theme, “AI Together,” reflects the idea that the next era will be built through collaboration among humans, AI systems, Taiwan and the global technology ecosystem.

Huang called COMPUTEX 2026 the largest in the event’s history, spanning Nangang Exhibition Hall 1, Hall 2, the Taipei World Trade Center and the Taipei International Convention Center, where NVIDIA is hosting GTC Taipei. He said the CEO keynote lineup includes Amon, Marvell CEO Matt Murphy, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and NXP CEO Rafael Sotomayor.

COMPUTEX Organizers Emphasize AI Systems and Robotics

Jason Chen, chairman of the Taipei Computer Association, said the AI Together theme is “far more than a slogan” and reflects AI’s move from innovation showcases to real-world deployments, system integration and global collaboration.

Chen said COMPUTEX 2026 includes more than 1,500 exhibitors across 6,000 booths. He said AI competition is no longer only about models or computing power, but about “complete system capacity,” including chips, servers, PCs, connectivity, data governance, thermal management, energy efficiency and applications in manufacturing, healthcare, retail, transportation and urban governance.

Chen summarized the event’s core focus in five keywords: computing, connectivity, storage, efficiency and application. He also highlighted InnoVEX, the startup-focused portion of the show, and said a drone show featuring 1,000 MIT drones would take place with Taipei 101 as the stage.

Huang said COMPUTEX is dedicating an entire pavilion to robotics for the first time, with companies including Intel, E Ink, HIWIN, Solomon and Texas Instruments participating. He said forum sessions on physical AI would include executives involved in robotics at NVIDIA, Qualcomm, ABB and NXP.

Qualcomm CEO Says 2026 Is the ‘Year of Agents’

Amon opened Qualcomm’s keynote by thanking the company’s Taiwan partners, including suppliers, development partners and TSMC. He said the presentation was “not about Qualcomm” but about the broader ecosystem and partnerships that drive technology development.

Amon said Qualcomm views 2026 as “the year of agents,” describing AI agents as systems that move beyond answering prompts to taking action, carrying context forward and operating across devices. He said the phone has historically been the center of a user’s digital life, but agents will become the center of the digital experience, with phones and other devices serving as endpoints.

He cited the scale of the opportunity across edge devices, including about 6 billion phones, 2 billion personal AI devices, 2 billion PCs and 500 million connected cars. Amon said existing devices were designed around actions initiated by users, not autonomous agents, and that the shift will require changes in hardware, operating systems and applications.

“The agent is going to operate the device as well, and that’s how devices are going to be in the future,” Amon said.

Edge Devices, Cars and Robots Seen as AI Endpoints

Amon said agentic AI will require power-efficient CPUs for task orchestration, as well as NPUs and GPUs capable of running local models. He emphasized power consumption and latency as major engineering challenges, particularly for mobile devices that will need to support both user activity and agent activity.

Qualcomm showed examples of agentic assistants and orchestrators running on Snapdragon platforms, including references to OpenClaw, Hermes and Claude Desktop on Snapdragon PCs. Amon also cited Google’s work bringing agentic AI into Android through Gemini Intelligence and Microsoft’s efforts in the same area.

In automotive, Amon described two layers of intelligence: cockpit AI that personalizes the user experience and physical AI that uses cameras, radar, sensors and maps to perceive, plan and act on the road. He said software-defined vehicles are evolving toward “AI-defined” vehicles.

Amon also identified robotics as a major category for physical AI, saying robots require hierarchical compute systems for instant execution, action, grounding and reasoning. He said Qualcomm is building platforms across form factors including autonomous mobile robots, industrial arms, four-legged robots, humanoids and drones.

Distributed AI and Token Demand

Amon said AI workloads will be distributed across cloud and edge devices, arguing that both will be part of a single compute continuum. He said agents will drive significant growth in token demand because they interact with software autonomously and at machine speed.

He described a progression from conversational AI at about 10,000 tokens per prompt-response task, to reasoning at about 100,000 tokens per task, to agentic AI at about 1 million tokens per task. He said global token demand within a 10-second period is estimated at 31.7 billion tokens in 2026 and projected to reach 1.27 trillion tokens in 2030.

Amon said distributed agentic AI can reduce token usage and costs by routing work between device and cloud compute. In one coding example, he said the approach saved about 1.4 million tokens and reduced costs by 60%. In another webpage-generation example, he said distributed routing produced the same result with 30% fewer tokens and 4 times lower cost.

Qualcomm Introduces Dragonfly Data Center Brand

Amon closed the keynote by announcing Dragonfly, the new product brand for Qualcomm data center products. He said Qualcomm is already working with hyperscalers and global partners on real-world deployments, and that more details would be shared at the company’s Investor Day on June 24.

He said Dragonfly extends Qualcomm’s portfolio across the compute continuum, from wearables that connect to agents to high-performance data centers. Amon said the arrival of agents is already changing computing and could generate “one of the largest” device upgrade cycles the industry has seen.

About Qualcomm NASDAQ: QCOM

Qualcomm Incorporated is a global semiconductor and telecommunications equipment company headquartered in San Diego, California. Founded in 1985, the company is known for its development of wireless technologies and for playing a central role in the evolution of digital cellular standards, including CDMA and subsequent generations of mobile standards. Qualcomm’s business combines the design and sale of semiconductor products with a patent licensing program for wireless technologies and related intellectual property.

The company’s product portfolio includes system-on-chip (SoC) platforms marketed under the Snapdragon brand, cellular modem and RF front-end components, connectivity solutions for Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth, and processors and platforms aimed at automotive, IoT, networking and edge-computing applications.

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