A Qualcomm executive talks with Matt Wolfe about building open AI infrastructure that works across cloud, edge devices, and phones. The company acquired Modular to create a Linux-like platform for AI, and released the Dragonfly C1000 chip to manage workloads across different hardware. Closed systems will lose to open ecosystems.
The CEO of Qualcomm, the chip company that powers everything from personal devices like your phone to AI data centers, just told me what they're betting huge on.
Resistance to the edge is futile. People keep arguing about the data center's enough, or some people are going, no, I can do this on the edge. Edge is everything outside the data center, like the phones, the cars, the computer. And I think it's a useless debate. Where you're going to end up with this fabric of computes, what it has to run at the edge is going to run at the edge. What it has to run in the cloud is going to run in the cloud.
Qualcomm calls this distributed intelligence, AI that can move between the cloud, the edge, and your actual devices depending on what makes the most sense. And to power all this, they created Dragonfly C1000 to fix a big problem with how data centers currently operate.
Let's create a different solution that is more efficient in power and cost. We kind of create a solution we call high-bandwidth compute. We're building what we think is going to be the highest performance, lowest power consumption CPU for orchestrators.
Now the other big piece of this shift is software. Qualcomm's agreement to acquire Modular is about making AI easier to run across anything— data centers, edge devices, and even different hardware.
Our ambition is to make Modular the Linux of AI. This is a team that had a very simple mission, which is to democratize AI, to create a platform that is available to everyone, that is open for developers. I always been a big believer that closed systems are not the ones that win at the end. Open horizontal systems are the ones that win at the end.
Right now, AI chatbots live in your app, but the next generation of AI may live across the entire computing system.
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