It's perfectly normal to consider that Nvidia and AMD are the only players in the AI accelerator space, at least for the time being. Other marques want a slice of that pie, though, and Qualcomm is among them. The Snapdragon maker has finally scored a big deployment, installing 1,024 AI100 chips in Saudi Arabia's Humain outfit, its CEO announced. There's only one slight issue, though: AI100 unveiled in 2019, and is looking pretty old by today's standards.
The AI100 has been available as a drop-in card since mid-2023, but its architecture is now about six years old. Although at the time it was a promising design banking on power efficiency for inference tasks, it's a pretty tough sell today as its small memory capacity (only 128 GB in the Ultra variant) limits the size of the models it can run — reportedly only those with up to 32B parameters. In 2026 terms, that's peanuts, as contemporary reasoning models use tens of times that amount.
