Nvidia, the biggest success story of AI boom, gets a ‘mighty American’ rival; and Wall Street is all ‘smiles’

The world’s most-valuable company Nvidia just got an ‘American rival’ and a ‘mighty one’. The San Diego-based Qualcomm, best known for powering smartphones and PCs, has introduced two new AI processors — the AI200 and AI250 — marking a major push into a market dominated by rivals Nvidia and AMD. The launch of Qualcomm’s new AI chips has sent the company’s stock soaring. Shares of Qualcomm skyrocketed as much as 20% on Monday, October 27, after the US chipmaker unveiled a major push into the lucrative artificial intelligence data center market, a space currently dominated Nvidia.

Qualcomm is specifically targeting the AI inference market, focusing on chips optimized for running already-trained AI models to generate responses.