Qualcomm Shares Jump After Amazon Ties $60 Billion in AI Chip Orders to $4 Billion Stock Warrant

Qualcomm shares spiked Tuesday, September 8, after the company announced a data-center partnership with Amazon Web Services aimed at taking on Nvidia in the AI chip market.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Qualcomm issued Amazon a warrant to acquire 25 million shares at $161.26 each, a stake valued at roughly $4 billion. The warrant doesn't expire until September 3, 2036, and Qualcomm said the shares vest in tranches tied to "the execution of certain commercial arrangements" and the purchase of up to $60 billion worth of Qualcomm's server chips and related technology, according to CNBC.

The two companies said they will co-develop custom silicon across multiple generations, focused specifically on AI inference, the process of running an already-trained model to generate answers, rather than training new models from scratch. They'll also build optical connectivity technology capable of hitting 1.6 terabits per second to move data faster between server racks, according to Reuters, carried by WHBL and AOL. Qualcomm is also expanding its own use of AWS tools, including Amazon Bedrock, for its chip design work.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon framed the deal as a bet on efficiency, telling reporters, per Startup Fortune: "As AI demand accelerates, data center infrastructure will require advances in both computing and connectivity to deliver greater performance with more efficiency."

How Much Did the Stock Actually Move?

CNBC and Appic News reported shares rose 4% on the news. Yahoo Finance clocked the move at 5%, putting the stock at $177.60 in early trading. Reuters, via WHBL and AOL, put it at more than 7%. Crypto Briefing and AI Weekly said the stock jumped closer to 10%, trading between $179.84 and $185. Startup Fortune split the difference at 9.5% to 10%, citing CNBC and Investing.com.

These aren't contradictory reports so much as snapshots taken at different points in a single trading session. Qualcomm stock was still moving as the day went on, and the percentage gain depended entirely on when each outlet checked the price. What's consistent across every source: this was the stock's biggest one-day move in months, and it came against a broader market that was down, with the S&P 500 off roughly 0.35% and the SPY ETF down about 0.47%, per Yahoo Finance.

Broadcom, a rival in custom AI silicon, also rose 3% to 3.5%, which Yahoo Finance read as validation of the entire custom-chip category rather than a signal that customers are shifting away from Broadcom toward Qualcomm. Amazon's own stock barely moved, dipping about 0.6% to 1%, unsurprising given the modest size of the deal relative to Amazon's balance sheet.

The Bigger Picture for Qualcomm

Qualcomm built its business on smartphone processors, but it's racing to diversify as it faces the eventual loss of its modem business from Apple, according to Reuters. In June, the company unveiled a data-center CPU called Dragonfly C1000 and landed Meta as a customer for 2028 production. Qualcomm has also signed Microsoft. With Amazon now on board, Qualcomm has deals with three of the largest cloud providers in the world.

Qualcomm has set a target of $15 billion in data-center revenue and $40 billion in total non-handset chip revenue by fiscal 2029, according to Crypto Briefing. Bank of America projects the broader server CPU market could more than double, from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion by 2030, per CNBC.

The Amazon deal also isn't unique in structure. Reuters noted it comes weeks after Marvell Technology struck a similar custom AI chip arrangement with Alphabet's Google, giving Google the right to buy a stake worth up to $12.2 billion. Warrant-for-orders deals are becoming a standard tool across the AI supply chain, and Reuters flagged that some investors are raising questions about how intertwined these financial relationships are becoming between chipmakers and their biggest customers.

What's Actually Guaranteed Here

According to Yahoo Finance, Qualcomm disclosed no committed order volume and no delivery timeline. The $60 billion figure is a ceiling tied to future business Amazon may or may not place, not a signed purchase order. Yahoo Finance pointed out Qualcomm trades at roughly 33 times earnings, a multiple that assumes the data-center ramp materializes. If it doesn't, that valuation is exposed.

There's also a dilution question. Crypto Briefing noted that if Amazon vests the full 25 million shares, existing Qualcomm shareholders get diluted, even as Amazon gains a financial incentive to keep routing orders Qualcomm's way. Amazon already runs its own competing silicon program through Annapurna Labs, with Trainium chips reportedly on a $25 billion annual run rate, according to Startup Fortune, raising the open question of how much Amazon actually needs an outside chip partner for inference work versus using this deal to hedge its Nvidia dependence.

Qualcomm has not disclosed how many of the 25 million warrant shares have vested to date beyond an initial tranche of 3.75 million, according to Crypto Briefing. Whether Amazon ultimately places anywhere near $60 billion in orders over the life of the warrant, which runs through 2036, remains the central unanswered question for investors betting on Qualcomm's data-center pivot.