Qualcomm hands Amazon $4B of warrants to build custom silicon for AWS

Qualcomm has issued Amazon warrants over 25 million shares worth about $4B, vesting against commercial milestones and up to $60B of server chip purchases, alongside a multi-generation custom silicon deal for AWS. Qualcomm is also one of three chipmakers that signed memoranda to supply the EU’s AI gigafactories, a programme with roughly EUR 1B actually committed.

Qualcomm has issued warrants letting Amazon buy 25 million of its shares at $161.26 each, a $4B position, alongside a multi-generation deal to build custom silicon for AWS, CNBC reported. The shares rose 4%.

The warrants vest in tranches tied to commercial arrangements and to Amazon buying up to $60B of Qualcomm server chips and technology. They expire on 3 September 2036.

The work covers AI inference and optical connectivity up to 1.6T, using Qualcomm’s SerDes and optical DSP. Qualcomm will also run chip design workloads on Amazon Bedrock.

It follows June, when Qualcomm unveiled the Dragonfly C1000 data centre processor with Meta as a customer from 2028, and set a $15B data centre revenue target for fiscal 2029.

Amazon is being paid in equity to become a customer. That arrangement is becoming ordinary in AI infrastructure, and it is worth naming when it happens.

The European relevance here is direct.

Qualcomm is one of three chipmakers, with Nvidia and AMD, that signed memoranda to supply the EU’s AI gigafactories.

That programme covers up to seven sites and about EUR 30B, of which EUR 10B is public and roughly EUR 1B from Brussels is actually committed. Construction starts early next year and sites go online in mid-2028, with ten member states interested in hosting.

So the supplier Europe has lined up has just committed multiple generations of silicon to a customer with up to $60B attached, and a decade-long warrant to match.

Europe’s own data centre processor is Rhea1, an 80-core Arm design from SiPearl built on TSMC’s N6 process. It powered on in May, is due at the end of this year, and goes into the Jupiter supercomputer at Julich rather than a hyperscaler.

Qualcomm has been buying the rest of the stack too, and was in talks to buy Modular, an AI infrastructure software company, for about $4B in June.

Bank of America expects the server processor market to more than double, from $27B in 2025 to $60B by 2030, and Nvidia, Intel and AMD are all pushing into it.

Europe’s gigafactory chips are American and most of its money is still notional. TNW has argued that access is not sovereignty, and this is what the other side of that looks like.