Wells Fargo has estimated that Qualcomm could generate between $5 billion and $7 billion in annual revenue from its data-center chip business beginning in 2027. The brokerage highlighted several strategic moves and technology traits that it says support that outlook, and the market reacted: Qualcomm shares traded up more than 2% in premarket activity on Tuesday after the report, which also included an analyst upgrade to Equal weight and a raised price target of $150 from $135.
Wells Fargo’s view and market opportunity
The firm describes a greater than $100 billion opportunity for AI inference. Wells Fargo told investors it considers Qualcomm’s push into data-center AI chips underappreciated in the company’s valuation, and suggested that forthcoming strategy updates or announcements around partnerships tied to the push could change investor sentiment.
Wells noted growing demand for heterogeneous inference architectures, especially for workloads that call for substantial memory capacity. The brokerage identified Qualcomm’s AI200 and AI250 platforms as being tailored to memory-intensive tasks, including long-context models, high-parameter systems and video diffusion workloads.
Partnerships and customer momentum
Wells Fargo referenced existing collaborations, saying Qualcomm is working with HUMAIN and Adobe on image and video generation use cases that require large amounts of compute. The brokerage also flagged the potential for a ‘‘material’’ ramp in data-center revenue in fiscal 2027 and said that ramp could even be accelerated. Wells pointed to the possibility of hyperscale customer announcements in the first half of 2026 as specific catalysts for the stock.
Strategic acquisitions and supply-side advantages
The note underscored Qualcomm’s acquisitions of Alphawave Semi and Ventana as central to the company’s evolving data-center strategy. According to Wells Fargo, Alphawave contributes memory and connectivity intellectual property—citing UCIe, PCIe/CXL and high-bandwidth memory interfaces—plus custom system-on-chip capabilities. Ventana brings the Veyron V2 CPU architecture, which Wells says could broaden Qualcomm’s ability to offer custom server-class platforms to hyperscale and high-performance computing customers.
Wells Fargo also highlighted Qualcomm’s wafer allocation at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co as a potential competitive advantage. As a significant 2-nanometer customer at TSMC, Qualcomm may be able to shift capacity away from a soft smartphone market in 2026 toward data-center products, the brokerage said, supporting both the AI-series chips and future CPU offerings.
Technology perspective and limitations
While Wells Fargo does not characterize Qualcomm’s current AI200 technology as novel, the brokerage believes that single-chip, memory-heavy architectures will have a defined role in specific inference workloads as data-center computing evolves. That assessment frames the expectation for targeted revenue growth from the company’s AI efforts.
Note: This analysis reports the findings and projections as stated by Wells Fargo, including the firm’s expectations for revenue timing and potential catalysts. Market moves and strategic outcomes remain subject to the developments and announcements cited by the brokerage.