Qualcomm shares soar 20% on new AI chip launch

Shares in US chipmaker Qualcomm skyrocketed on Monday after the company unveiled two new artificial intelligence processors designed for data centers, marking a major push into a market dominated by rivals Nvidia and AMD.

Qualcomm said the AI200 and AI250 chips were optimized for AI inference — the process of running already-trained AI models to generate responses — rather than the training phase that requires more computing power and is dominated by Nvidia’s powerful GPUs.