Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Fortune in two interviews this week that the company is supplying chips to "pretty much all" of the major AI players building post-smartphone devices, with "secret form factors" he could not name. Named partners include OpenAI and Meta. Amon's bet — laid out in a longer conversation with Fortune's Andrew Nusca published May 6 and reinforced in a follow-up May 9 — is that within two years the smartphone is no longer the center of computing, and that the device replacing it is a coordinated set of wearables: glasses with cameras, earbuds, and pins or pendants that share an AI agent across them.
The "Ecosystem of You"
Amon's frame is that the next computing surface is not a screen. It is a body. The glasses see what you see. The earbuds hear what you hear. An AI agent ties them together and acts on your behalf — paying restaurant bills, pricing items in a store, scheduling appointments, summarizing meetings without recording them. He named glasses, earbuds, jewelry, pins, and pendants as the form factors he expects to ship in volume by 2027-2028.
Why Qualcomm Has the Position
The smartphone era made Qualcomm the default modem-and-application-processor vendor for every Android OEM that mattered, plus iPhone modems for years. Apple has built its own application processor and is in the multi-year process of replacing the Qualcomm modem with Apple silicon. The post-smartphone era, on Amon's reading, resets the supplier playbook. New form factors mean new thermal envelopes, new battery profiles, new connectivity requirements, new on-device model constraints — none of which the existing Apple silicon vertical is optimized for, and all of which Qualcomm has spent the last six years building toward in its Snapdragon and Snapdragon X lines.
The strategic upside is large. If the wearable replaces some meaningful share of smartphone computing, the units are larger (multiple devices per person, not one), the refresh cycle is faster (jewelry-form devices wear out), and Qualcomm starts every conversation as the incumbent. If it doesn't replace the smartphone — if these wearables remain accessories to a phone — Qualcomm still owns the chip in both halves of the stack.
The Bigger Read
The dominant narrative in 2026 enterprise AI has been that the model layer is the prize: see Anthropic's $30B revenue run rate, OpenAI's revenue trajectory, and the Novo Nordisk full-stack OpenAI deployment we wrote about last week. Amon's interview is a reminder that the model layer needs a substrate. Every "secret form factor" — every pin, every set of glasses, every earbud — runs on a chip somebody has to build, on a thermal budget somebody has to design, on a connectivity stack somebody has to certify. The model wars are loud. The chip wars under them have already been quietly settled in advance, and the company that won the smartphone era is making sure it wins the wearable era too.
The smartphone took fifteen years to fully reshape consumer behavior. Amon is betting wearables compress that timeline to four. If he is right, the inflection is closer than the headlines about it suggest.
Qualcomm has since moved to own more of that substrate, agreeing to acquire AI software startup Modular in a $3.92 billion all-stock deal.
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