Qualcomm Inc. on Monday agreed to buy Alphawave for about $2.4 billion in its aggressive pursuit of the red-hot AI data center market.
The acquisition of Alphawave, a British company that designs semiconductor tech for data centers, comes after Qualcomm snapped up the generative AI division of Vietnamese startup VinAI, as well as internet of things company Edge Impulse.
The flurry of deals are intended to diversify Qualcomm’s portfolio as it navigates headwinds that include a weakening smartphone market and potential tariffs.
While Qualcomm is trying to capture market share in PC processors as part of its diversification bid, its Alphawave deal is likely targeted at data center and AI chips. Arm, another aspirant in data center and AI silicon, has made an unsuccessful attempt to buy Alphawave.
The deal is expected to close in early 2026.
“Alphawave Semi has developed leading high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies that are complementary to our power-efficient CPU and NPU cores,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a statement announcing the deal. “Qualcomm’s advanced custom processors are a natural fit for data center workloads. The combined teams share the goal of building advanced technology solutions and enabling next-level connected computing performance across a wide array of high growth areas, including data center infrastructure.”
Alphawave’s serializer-deserializer (SerDes) technology, which allows high-speed data transfer crucial for AI applications, should help Qualcomm develop chips capable of handling the massive data transfer requirements of modern AI workloads. Alphawave is not merely an IP company; it is also into chiplets and custom ASICs, added industry observers.
Silicon Valley analyst Jack Gold says the deal positions Qualcomm as a “full-service provider” of SOCs (Security Operations Center) for data center and AI specific functions, especially for inference workloads at the edge.
“High speed and reliable networking is often overlooked as a critical component of AI and high-performance workloads. But having this capability in-house enables Qualcomm to create an optimized full system approach that will enhance its capabilities and make it an even more attractive option for power efficient compute solutions, thereby enhancing its CPU and NPU based offerings,” Gold said.
