During his opening keynote at the Computex 2026 conference, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon declared 2026 the “Year of the Agent,” outlining a future in which artificial intelligence moves beyond responding to prompts and increasingly takes action through intelligent agents operating across smartphones, PCs, vehicles, robots, industrial systems, and cloud infrastructure.
According to Amon, agentic AI is already reshaping the computing landscape and creating demand for a new generation of devices and infrastructure. He emphasized that Qualcomm is positioned to support this transition through its portfolio of CPU, GPU, NPU, and connectivity technologies, enabling AI workloads across both edge devices and cloud environments.
A central theme of the keynote was the growing importance of distributed computing as AI workloads generate trillions of tokens. Qualcomm believes power efficiency and performance will become equally critical as organizations deploy AI agents across a broad range of devices and environments. The company highlighted its ability to deliver computing solutions ranging from ultra-low-power devices such as earbuds to large-scale data center systems.
Amon also previewed Dragonfly, Qualcomm’s new data center product brand, which will extend the company’s performance-per-watt expertise into the rapidly growing AI infrastructure market. Qualcomm said additional details about Dragonfly will be revealed during its Investor Day event on June 24 in New York City.
The company framed Dragonfly as part of a broader strategy to support the full compute continuum, spanning wearables, smartphones, PCs, automotive systems, robotics, industrial applications, and data centers.
In addition to the Dragonfly announcement, Qualcomm unveiled several new initiatives at Computex, including the Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design, a platform designed to accelerate humanoid robotics development through integrated hardware and software capabilities. The company also introduced a new Snapdragon C platform for Windows laptops, targeting systems priced as low as $300 and expanding the addressable market for Snapdragon-powered PCs.
Qualcomm said these developments reinforce its strategy of enabling hybrid AI deployments, where intelligence is distributed between edge devices and cloud infrastructure and connected through future AI-native networking technologies such as 6G.
KEY QUOTES:
“The phone is [now] at the center of a digital life, and therefore, everything is around the phone…But now this is different. Agents become the center of your digital experience…It’s not about an extension of the phone, and the digital ecosystem is no longer at the phone itself, in the OS and the applications. Those devices become endpoints for agents.
Agents are not coming in the future. They’re already here. It’s changing a lot of the compute. It’s going to generate a lot of demand for new classes of devices and computing, and this upgrade cycle can be one of the largest that the industry has seen.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of power. Think about your phone. If it is challenging to make your phone last all day with you operating it, what happens when you and the agent are operating it? That’s an incredible engineering challenge for power and latency. Those devices need to be able to support planning, reasoning, coordination across the system. And for that, you can start to understand how the compute is going to evolve.
You need a very strong and power-efficient CPU for the orchestration of tasks. I think the industry now understands the importance of CPU for orchestration, and where the orchestrator is going to run. You need very power-efficient and high compute density of NPU and GPU to be able to run local models.
At Mobile World Congress, we described 6G as the first generation of wireless designed for the age of AI … [6G will be] the biggest change in the infrastructure of telecommunications and wireless since the beginning of mobility.”
Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm
“The physical world is one of the most exciting areas in our industry right now. Cars, robots, and industrial systems are going to be also significant endpoints for agentic AI. And in those systems, you have other requirements: latency and safety are measured in milliseconds, in millimeters. Every single watt matters.
We now have the ability to build systems from sub-2 milliwatts – from an earbud with micropower Wi-Fi that connects to an agent for a personal AI audio device – all the way to kilowatts, what’s going to happen in the data center. And I think that is the incredible opportunity that we see for us and for our partners – all of those devices are going to change for this future of Agentic AI. For that, you need dedicated computing solutions that scale all the way down to a sub-milliwatt device [and up] to a 2000 kilowatt. That’s an incredible opportunity, I think that we have in front of us, leading performance for what across smartphones, PCs, automotive, computing, robots, and extending that to the data center.
Tokens are the currency of AI … so let’s talk about coding. Coding workloads are some of the most token intensive tasks today. You see a real session running Claude Code. An orchestrator is now intelligently routing the workload, keeping certain tasks on a device and sending what’s necessary to the cloud. When you apply the distributed agentic AI, making use of all the compute across this compute continuum, you can see you save about 1.4 million tokens, 60% lower cost for the same result.
Today at Computex we are announcing the new product brand for Qualcomm datacenter products. We’re already working with hyperscalers and global partners on real world deployments. We’re incredibly excited with this new chapter of Qualcomm diversification. And now, with Dragonfly, our portfolio spans every single tier of the compute continuum, from the smallest wearables that will connect to agents, to data centers at very high performance.”
Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm
