When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
(Image credit: Qualcomm) 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.
Qualcomm's AI200 rack-scale solutions will be the company's first data-center-grade inference system powered by AI200 accelerators with 768 GB of LPDDR memory onboard (which is a lot of memory for an inference accelerator) that will use PCIe interconnects for scale-up and Ethernet for scale-out scalability. The system will use direct liquid cooling and a power envelope of 160 kW per rack, which is also an unprecedented power consumption for inference solutions. In addition, the system will support confidential computing for enterprise deployments. The solution will be available in 2026.
AMD preps Mega Pod with 256 Instinct MI500 AI GPUs, Verano CPUs
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/qualcomm-unveils-ai200-and-ai250-ai-inference-accelerators-hexagon-takes-on-amd-and-nvidia-in-the-booming-data-center-realm#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- Nvidia's market capitalization hits $5.12 trillion — AI powerhouse is the first company in history to hit seismic milestone
- Fangs Out, Frames Up: ‘Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2’ Leads a Killer GFN Thursday
- How to watch Nvidia GTC 2025 keynote — Jensen Huang shares the latest in AI and beyond
- SanDisk Extreme Pro With USB4 (2TB) review: Bursty speed, but not great for pros
- Scientists claim you can't see the difference between 1440p and 8K at 10 feet in new study on the limits of the human eye — would still be an improvement on the
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.