Qualcomm is expanding its chip-design services to China as it is reportedly in early talks with ByteDance.
China's ByteDance To Get Custom-Chip Design Assistance From Qualcomm As It Expands Its Revenue Beyond Smartphones
Custom-chip designs are picking up momentum across the tech industry, and a report by Reuters suggests that Qualcomm might be assisting ByteDance, a leading Chinese firm, with chip-design services.
Although the talks between Qualcomm and ByteDance are still early, if they succeed, then that would make ByteDance one of the first customers of Qualcomm's chip-design services. The move will also help Qualcomm diversify its revenue, breaking its shackles from a smartphone-focused chipmaker to a service provider in the chip-making business.
Qualcomm is in talks to provide chip-design services to China's ByteDance, four people familiar with the matter said, as the U.S. company seeks to reduce dependence on the smartphone market, its biggest revenue source.
Qualcomm has slowly been entering various markets with the likes of its X Elite lineup for AI PCs, and its most recent teaser of datacenter-oriented chips. Now, further diversification is expected through chip-making deals. The ByteDance talks show that US firms are willing to talk with China-based firms despite the US-China relations being in hot water, only somewhat lightened by the recent Trump-Xi meetup.
Early details regarding the custom chip suggest that they will be based on AlphaWave Semi's tech, a company that was acquired by Qualcomm last year. There is also talk about designed VPUs, & production is expected as early as this year's end.
In addition to this, Qualcomm also announced its acquisition of Modular, a company whose goal is to build the world's first unified compute platform, unlocking a more open, efficient, & hardware-independent ecosystem for future AI workloads. This shows that Qualcomm is serious about expanding into more segments, and data centers are looking to be its next major goal.
This announcement comes just a few hours ahead of Qualcomm's Investor Day 2026, where the company is going to talk about its future endeavors and give its investors a look at future plans for chips, products, and platforms.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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