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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owned nearly 3 million shares in chipmaker Qualcomm at the end of September, a stake worth $547.9m, Reuters reported on Friday.
The figures come from a regulatory filing that lists Alphabet’s holdings in other companies.
Qualcomm’s shares rose more than 3% in trading before the US market opened, following the news. The filing does not say when Alphabet bought the shares or why, and none of the reports carried a comment from either company.
The same filing shows that Alphabet also added to its holding in SpaceX. It owned about 555 million shares in Elon Musk’s rocket company at the end of September, up from 551.2 million previously. Google first invested in SpaceX in 2015, when it joined Fidelity in a $1bn funding round.
The Qualcomm stake comes at a mixed time for the chipmaker. Days earlier, it missed Wall Street’s expectations for quarterly sales of smartphone chips, which it blamed on weak demand.
However, Qualcomm forecast better-than-expected revenue for its data centre business, where it is trying to grow beyond phones.
In October last year, it unveiled the AI200 and AI250, its first chips built to run AI models in data centres. Since then, it has also signed a custom AI chip deal with TikTok owner ByteDance.
Alphabet and Qualcomm already work together in several areas. Qualcomm makes the Snapdragon chips that power many Android phones.
The two companies have also expanded their partnership on AI agents for cars, combining Google Cloud’s Gemini models with Qualcomm’s vehicle platform.
At the same time, Google designs its own AI chips, called TPUs, for its data centres, the same market that Qualcomm is now trying to enter.
The disclosure covers holdings as of September 30, the end of the third quarter. Large US investors must report such stakes every quarter, so the next update will come early next year.
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