The companies are also working on optical connectivity solutions extending up to 1.6T and future generation solutions. Disclosing the deal in a statement, president and chief executive officer of Qualcomm Incorporated, Cristiano Amon said: “As AI demand accelerates, data center infrastructure will require advances in both computing and connectivity to deliver greater performance with more efficiency. “Qualcomm is pleased to work with AWS on customised silicon and connectivity solutions, bringing decades of leadership in advanced processing and power-efficient compute, to deliver breakthrough performance and enable the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
As AI workloads grow exponentially — driving unprecedented demand for compute, storage, networking and memory bandwidth, and energy-efficient infrastructure — the collaboration brings together Amazon’s comprehensive, secure, and price-performant AI infrastructure with Qualcomm Technologies’ leadership in power-efficient processing, silicon design and system-level integration, according to a press release.
Qualcomm Technologies and Amazon will also collaborate on high-performance optical connectivity solutions designed to support the growing scale and bandwidth demands of AI infrastructure. The collaboration will leverage Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced SerDes and optical DSP technologies. As part of the expanded collaboration, Qualcomm Technologies plans to deepen its use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI infrastructure, including Amazon Bedrock, for electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, targeting a reduction in chip design cycles, as per the release.
Modern AI data centres are increasingly becoming massive interconnected systems in which thousands of computing devices must exchange enormous volumes of data. As AI workloads scale, moving data between processors can become a significant bottleneck. To address this challenge, Qualcomm and Amazon are also collaborating on high-performance optical connectivity solutions.
The companies are targeting solutions extending up to 1.6 terabits per second, along with future generations of higher-bandwidth technology. The work will leverage Qualcomm’s expertise in SerDes and optical digital signal processing technologies. These technologies are critical to moving data rapidly between different components of largescale computing systems. Amazon already has extensive experience developing its own data centre silicon through AWS.
The collaboration with Qualcomm adds another layer of semiconductor expertise, potentially allowing the companies to develop chips specifically tailored to the requirements of AI inference. Qualcomm says the collaboration will span multiple generations of customized silicon, suggesting that the companies are looking beyond a single product and instead intend to develop a longer-term technology roadmap.
