Qualcomm is preparing for what it believes could be the biggest transformation in consumer technology since the smartphone era, with Chief Executive Cristiano Amon revealing that the chipmaker is working on more than 40 new artificial intelligence-powered device designs as the industry shifts toward AI agents capable of carrying out tasks on behalf of users.

Speaking in a wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s “The Tech Download” podcast, Amon outlined a future in which AI assistants become the primary interface between humans and technology, reducing reliance on traditional apps and opening the door to an entirely new generation of wearable devices.

His comments provide one of the clearest indications yet that the semiconductor industry is positioning itself for a post-smartphone world, where AI-powered glasses, earbuds, watches, pins, and even jewelry could become as important as mobile phones are today.

The remarks also carry significant implications for technology giants, including Apple, Samsung, Meta, Google, and OpenAI, all of which are racing to establish their positions in the emerging AI hardware market.

AI Agents Become the New Battleground

Qualcomm’s strategy is centered on the belief that AI agents will fundamentally change how consumers interact with technology. Agents are widely viewed as the next evolution of digital assistants such as Siri, Gemini, and ChatGPT. Rather than responding to simple prompts, they are expected to understand context, make decisions, and perform complex, multi-step tasks across different applications and services.

Amon argued that this transition could dramatically reduce the need for users to manually navigate software.

“Apps are not dead,” he said. “But apps are going to change.”

“Those agents are going to be the new app,” he added.

The shift could redefine the software ecosystem that has dominated the technology industry for nearly two decades.

Today, consumers typically open individual applications for banking, shopping, messaging, travel bookings, and entertainment. In an agent-driven future, users may simply tell an AI assistant what they want, with the agent handling the interactions behind the scenes.

Amon cited banking as an example, describing a scenario where a user could instantly retrieve transaction information without opening an application or manually searching through account histories.

The broader implication is that AI companies may gain greater control over digital experiences while traditional app developers face increasing pressure to adapt their products to agent-based systems.

Amon said Qualcomm is already preparing for that future.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” he said.

“Right now, we have over 40 designs of those devices, and I’m telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad.”

The company is working with manufacturers on a wide range of AI-powered products, including smart glasses, watches, wearable pins, camera-equipped earbuds, and even jewelry. Unlike smartphones, these devices are designed to remain constantly connected to users and their surroundings, enabling AI systems to maintain awareness of context and respond more naturally.

“The principle is something that you wear, something [that] is with you all the time, something that can see the world around you, so you have context and have the ability for you to access an agent and talk to the agent,” Amon explained.

The concept aligns with the industry’s growing focus on ambient computing, where technology operates continuously in the background rather than requiring users to interact through screens and keyboards.

Why Smart Glasses Could Become the Next Smartphone

Among the various form factors, Amon expressed particular confidence in smart glasses, a category attracting increasing investment from major technology companies.

Meta has already launched AI-enabled glasses through its partnership with Ray-Ban, while Samsung and several other manufacturers are developing competing products.

According to Amon, adoption is accelerating much faster than many investors appreciate.

“Smart glasses shipments are now in the order of multiple tens of millions,” he said.

He believes the category could soon experience explosive growth.

“In a couple of years,” Amon said, shipments could reach the “order of hundreds of millions of glasses and could become as big as smartphones.”

That is a bold prediction considering that approximately 1.26 billion smartphones were shipped globally in 2025, according to Counterpoint Research.

Yet supporters of smart glasses argue that they solve one of AI’s biggest challenges: providing constant access to digital assistants without requiring users to stare at a screen.

If AI agents become the primary interface for computing, smart glasses could emerge as the most natural platform for delivering information, navigation, communications, and augmented reality experiences.

The transition toward AI-centric devices is also opening opportunities for companies that historically focused on software rather than hardware. Amon pointed to OpenAI’s acquisition of io, the startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, as evidence of this shift.

“All the devices that we wear become endpoints for agents, and those AI companies understand they have to win those endpoints from agents,” he said.

The statement highlights an increasingly important dynamic in the AI race. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are no longer competing solely through software models. They are increasingly exploring hardware as a way to secure direct access to users and build ecosystems around their AI platforms.

For traditional hardware leaders such as Apple and Samsung, this creates a new competitive threat from firms that previously operated almost entirely in software.

Beyond hardware sales, Amon suggested that access to user data is emerging as a major motivation behind the push into AI devices. He argued that future wearables will generate information on a scale far beyond what is currently available to AI companies.

Those devices will continuously collect information about environments, behaviors, preferences, and interactions, creating vast streams of real-world data.

“So those companies want to have access to the data, because it’s important to train future models,” Amon said.

The data collected by AI-enabled devices could become one of the most strategically valuable assets in the technology industry.

As large language models become increasingly similar in performance, proprietary datasets may emerge as a critical competitive advantage, helping companies build more personalized AI systems and maintain leadership positions.

Amon added that companies will also use the information to create highly customized AI experiences tailored to individual users.

Qualcomm’s Biggest Opportunity Since the Smartphone Boom

For Qualcomm, the rise of AI agents represents a potentially transformative opportunity. The company already provides chips used in smartphones, personal computers, automobiles, and connected devices. A proliferation of AI-powered wearables could significantly expand Qualcomm’s addressable market.

However, Amon acknowledged that current chip architectures were not designed for the coming wave of AI-native devices.

Smaller form factors require processors that are more powerful, more energy-efficient, and capable of running sophisticated AI workloads directly on the device.

“Our entire roadmap is in a process of upgrade right now,” he said.

“An entire roadmap, because I believe none of the devices we have today are prepared for the future.”

The statement underscores how AI is forcing semiconductor companies to rethink product development strategies. Future devices will need to process increasingly complex AI models locally while maintaining long battery life and operating within compact designs.

That challenge is driving a new race among chipmakers to build processors optimized for AI workloads rather than traditional computing tasks.

Qualcomm’s vision backs a growing belief across Silicon Valley that artificial intelligence is not simply another software upgrade but the foundation of an entirely new computing paradigm.

In that future, smartphones will remain important but may no longer sit at the center of users’ digital lives.

“The phone is around the agent. The new classes of devices … are going to be around the agent as well,” Amon said.

“And the agent will be the one that will understand human intentions and will do things for you, so there is a shift in what the center of gravity is.”

The breathtaking rise of SpaceX following its record-breaking market debut is increasingly being driven by something that traditional valuation models struggle to measure: investor faith in Elon Musk.

That was the central argument made by CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday as SpaceX shares continued their post-IPO rally, briefly pushing the company’s market capitalization above several of the world’s largest technology firms and bolstering its status as the dominant force in a new era of AI and space-related investing.

“The stock is called SpaceX, but it might as well be called Elon Musk,” Cramer said.

His remarks capture a growing consensus among both supporters and skeptics that SpaceX’s valuation is no longer being judged primarily on present-day earnings or cash flow. Instead, investors are placing enormous value on Musk’s ability to create entirely new industries and commercialize technologies that many initially dismissed as unrealistic.

At more than $2.5 trillion, SpaceX now commands a valuation that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago. The company remains far from being a conventional blue-chip business. While its Starlink satellite internet division generates substantial revenue and its launch operations dominate the commercial space market, the broader company continues to invest aggressively in projects that may not produce meaningful returns for years.

That has not stopped investors.

“There is no way this company, which could see losses for many years, deserves such a high valuation on its own. It only gets there because it’s run by Musk,” Cramer said.

Investors have shown increasing willingness to overlook near-term profitability if they believe a company controls technologies capable of reshaping major industries. In SpaceX’s case, those opportunities span satellite communications, reusable rockets, defense technologies, artificial intelligence infrastructure, autonomous systems, and potentially orbital computing.

While SpaceX built its reputation as a space company, investors are increasingly treating it as an artificial intelligence infrastructure play. The company’s acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion adds another layer to a rapidly expanding AI strategy that already includes xAI, Grok, large-scale data centers, and plans for orbital computing networks.

Musk has repeatedly argued that future AI growth will be constrained by electricity and computing capacity rather than algorithms alone. SpaceX’s vision of deploying AI infrastructure in orbit aims to address those constraints through solar-powered computing systems operating beyond Earth’s crowded energy grid.

That narrative has become attractive as global spending on AI infrastructure accelerates. Technology companies, including Oracle, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Amazon, are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers capable of supporting increasingly powerful AI systems.

SpaceX is taking a position not merely as a participant in that trend but as a company attempting to redefine how AI infrastructure itself is built.

A Major Signal For AI IPOs

The success of SpaceX’s debut is being closely watched across Silicon Valley because it could shape investor appetite for the next wave of mega-cap technology listings. The market is preparing for public offerings from AI leaders, including OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies that have already reached valuations approaching $1 trillion despite posting significant losses.

Investors have long debated whether public markets would support those valuations once detailed financial information became available. SpaceX’s explosive debut is seen as an indication that investors may be willing to continue prioritizing growth potential and technological leadership over near-term profitability.

That significantly matters due to the similarities between SpaceX and the leading AI companies. Like OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceX is spending heavily today in pursuit of markets that could be dramatically larger a decade from now. A strong aftermarket performance for SpaceX may therefore strengthen confidence that public investors remain willing to finance ambitious, capital-intensive technology companies at unprecedented valuations.

Conversely, had SpaceX struggled after listing, it could have raised concerns about whether markets were beginning to push back against the lofty valuations assigned to AI firms.

The “Musk premium”

Perhaps the most important factor underpinning SpaceX’s valuation is what some analysts describe as the “Musk premium.” The phenomenon reflects investors’ willingness to assign additional value to ventures associated with Musk because of his history of building transformative businesses.

Supporters point to his role in establishing leadership positions in electric vehicles, commercial spaceflight, satellite communications, and artificial intelligence. Many investors appear to believe that backing Musk provides exposure not only to SpaceX’s current operations but also to future businesses that have yet to be fully developed.

Cramer compared that dynamic to how previous generations viewed Berkshire Hathaway under Warren Buffett.

“When you buy SpaceX here, you’re really buying Elon Musk’s brain,” he said. “I think the cult of Musk is for real.”

However, the enthusiasm surrounding SpaceX does not eliminate significant risks. The company’s valuation assumes extraordinary future growth across multiple industries, many of which remain highly uncertain. Its orbital AI computing ambitions have yet to be proven commercially. Competition in AI is intensifying. Regulatory scrutiny remains a constant challenge. And a large portion of SpaceX’s value is closely tied to confidence in Musk himself.

That concentration creates both opportunity and risk.

As London Business School finance professor James Dow recently noted, much of SpaceX’s valuation is inseparable from Musk’s personal involvement and vision.

Still, the market’s message so far has been clear. Investors are not buying SpaceX primarily because of what it earns today. They are buying what they believe Musk can build tomorrow. Currently, that belief is proving powerful enough to support one of the most valuable companies in financial history and is providing a potentially bullish signal for the wave of AI IPOs waiting in the wings.