Today · relayed October 10

Qualcomm says AI firms want 100B phone models; it names none

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says some frontier AI companies want phones that can run a model of at least 100 billion parameters, more or less all the time, by 2028. In his words: "some of the companies at the forefront of AI—are telling Qualcomm, 'By 2028, I need to make sure that I have the ability to run at least a 100-billion-parameter model in a phone, and I need to have this thing running kind of all the time.'" He also said: "AI companies are starting to do phones." (Alex Heath's interview; transcript). He didn't say which companies; the passage comes via a third-party transcript, and we didn't listen to the original interview. What follows is our reading, not Amon's: the ask is for a model that stays running, not one called now and then, so its weights have to sit in the phone's memory permanently; memory capacity and standby power may therefore hit their limits before compute does.

Concept illustration: on the left, a woman with long dark hair in a brown suit sits at a long white table, gesturing with one hand, an open laptop in front of her showing a speech bubble with grey lines; a thought bubble linked to her by small circles holds a red smartphone whose screen also shows a speech bubble with grey lines. On the right, a man in a black turtleneck with a white card on a lanyard sits across the table with hands clasped, in front of a beige wall lettered QUALCOMM in black beside a blue ring-shaped emblem.

Source

This item ran in the brief of Oct 11, 2026, alongside 13 other items.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Qualcomm says AI firms want 100B phone models; it names none." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-11-3/. Accessed access date.