Qualcomm on Monday formally announced two upcoming AI inference accelerators — the AI200 and AI250 — that will hit the market in 2026 and 2027. The new accelerators are said to compete against rack-scale solutions from AMD and Nvidia with improved efficiency and lower operational costs when running large-scale generative AI workloads. The announcement also reaffirms Qualcomm's plan to release updated products on a yearly cadence.
Both Qualcomm AI200 and AI250 accelerators are based on Qualcomm Hexagon neural processing units (NPUs) customized for data center AI workloads. The company has been gradually improving its Hexagon NPUs in the recent years, so the latest versions of these processors already feature scalar, vector, and tensor accelerators (in a 12+8+1 configuration), support such data formats as INT2, INT4, INT8, INT16, FP8, FP16, micro-tile inferencing to reduce memory traffic, 64-bit memory addressing, virtualization, and Gen AI model encryption for extra security. Scaling Hexagon for data center workloads is a natural choice for Qualcomm, though it remains to be seen what performance targets the company will set for its AI200 and AI250 units.
