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- Qualcomm currently sells AI accelerator processors but has the CPU market in its sights
- Sailesh Kottapalli’s experience is in x86 architecture, not Arm
- But that didn’t stop Qualcomm from bringing him on board to lead its data center team
Qualcomm, renowned for its Snapdragon processors business smartphones and laptops in the world, made a potentially key lease as it seems to challenge tastes AMD and Intel in the processor market.
The company’s latest hit is hiring Sailesh Kottapalli, a former chief architect for Xeon processors and a 28-year Intel veteran.
Kottapalli joined Qualcomm as a senior vice president in early January 2025, bringing extensive expertise in designing high-performance x86 server chips.
The movement of Kottapalli to Arm
Kottapalli wrote about it LinkedIn that “the opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers was immensely compelling to me—a once-in-a-career opportunity that I couldn’t pass on.”
Which makes the move significant, given Qualcomm’s confidence arm-based designs, is Kottapalli’s expertise in x86 architecture. His leadership could help bridge the gap between Qualcomm’s existing technology and demanding data center CPU requirements.
A renewed push for the data center
Qualcomm had withdrawn from server CPU development in 2018, but the company has now revealed plans to develop high-performance and energy-efficient server solutions suitable for data center applications.
This journey began with its Snapdragon X series for PCs, with custom Arm-based cores derived from its $1.4 billion acquisition of startup Nuvia in 2021, which built to a legal crescendo in a Delaware court in December 2024 when Arm claimed that the acquisition of Qualcomm violated its license terms. Although a federal jury sided with Qualcomm, Arm is seeking a new trial.
For now, however, Qualcomm has expanded its presence in the data center sector, with AI accelerator chips under the Qualcomm Cloud AI brand supported by industry leaders such as AWS, HPE and Lenovo.
