Qualcomm expands investments in Saudi Arabia — Asharq Al-Awsat
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon announced an expansion of the company’s investments in Saudi Arabia at the Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Hawaii, United States. According to him, Saudi company HUMAIN became Qualcomm’s first customer in AI data center solutions, Asharq Al-Awsat reports.
Amon noted that Qualcomm’s cooperation in the kingdom extends beyond data centers. The company is developing solutions for AI PCs, industrial applications together with Aramco, engineering projects, and automotive technologies. Qualcomm has also opened an engineering center in Riyadh and is expanding its research activities there, seeking specialists in AI, semiconductors, and advanced computing platforms.
Industrial AI and cars
Amon named “physical AI” — systems that work with sensor data, images, and equipment signals — as one of the promising areas. Such technologies can be used in manufacturing, energy, robotics, and transport. In cooperation with Aramco, Qualcomm is considering the use of edge computing, in which data is processed close to where it is generated rather than constantly transmitted to a remote data center.
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The company is also working with Ceer, a Saudi electric vehicle manufacturer that uses Qualcomm technologies. Amon described the car as a connected computer on wheels: computing systems in vehicles can support a digital dashboard, control functions, driver-assistance systems, and autonomous driving.
Bet on AI devices
The head of Qualcomm believes that the development of AI agents is changing requirements for smartphones: they must perform tasks on the user’s behalf, including searching for information or interacting with applications. Qualcomm said its flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 platform can run Mixture of Experts models with more than 30 billion parameters on the device. The company also introduced two premium platforms instead of one.
According to Amon, personal AI should work across several devices — smartphones, glasses, audio devices, and automotive systems. At the same time, he stressed the need for users to control which data remains on the device, which can be sent to cloud services, and what information an AI agent can access. In his view, the development of local computing will not diminish the role of data centers, as devices and cloud infrastructure will grow in parallel.
