Amazon and Qualcomm just announced they’ll build custom AI chips together, but the more revealing part of this deal sits in a separate SEC filing that most coverage will skip past: Qualcomm handed an Amazon affiliate a warrant to buy up to 25 million Qualcomm shares, tied to as much as $60 billion in chip purchases over the next decade.
That structure matters because it changes what this partnership actually is. Qualcomm issued the shares at $161.26 each, and they vest in stages as Amazon signs binding purchase orders and actually buys server chips, technology and manufacturing services. Qualcomm already released 3.75 million shares based on initial commitments, and the warrant runs until September 2036. Nobody has confirmed Amazon will spend the full $60 billion. That figure represents the ceiling, not a promise, but tying equity to purchase volume gives both companies a reason to keep the relationship going well past a typical multi-year supply contract.
The chips themselves cover AI inference and optical connectivity running up to 1.6 terabits per second, adding Qualcomm to a growing list of chip suppliers already feeding Amazon’s AI infrastructure. AWS already runs its own Trainium and Inferentia accelerators alongside Nvidia GPU instances, and Anthropic alone is using more than a million Trainium2 chips through Project Rainier. Neither company has said whether Qualcomm’s silicon will replace part of that mix, sit alongside it, or serve entirely different workloads. AWS hasn’t disclosed deployment timelines either.
What’s notable is how closely this mirrors moves by Amazon’s rivals. Microsoft builds Maia chips while still buying from Nvidia and AMD. Google keeps developing its TPUs alongside outside hardware. Meta just detailed its MTIA 300 accelerator in August. Every major cloud provider is now hedging against chip shortages and pricing power by building relationships with multiple suppliers at once, rather than betting everything on one vendor.
Qualcomm gets something out of this too, beyond the chip orders. It’s targeting more than $15 billion in data center revenue by fiscal 2029, and locking Amazon into a warrant-based purchase structure gives that target a firmer foundation than a handshake ever could.
