Qualcomm’s CEO tells his team they are in the gladiator business. It is not a motivational metaphor. It is his way of describing the odds.
Amon explains it as a fight that never really ends. You step into the arena and three things can happen: you win, you lose, or both sides lose. And even if you win, it does not last very long. All you earn is the right to come back and compete again the next day.
He has spent nearly five years running one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies, and he knows how quickly things can change. The industry has produced some of the most valuable companies in history, but it has also seen giants that once looked untouchable disappear. For Amon, what works today guarantees nothing tomorrow.
Three years at a bankrupt company
There is one episode in his career that helps explain the way he thinks.
In the 1990s, Amon left Qualcomm to run a company in Brazil that was close to bankruptcy and in which Qualcomm held a minority stake. He did it because he felt there was one experience missing from his career: he already knew what it was like to grow a business quickly and manage a stable one, but he had never gone through a real crisis.
He says those three years taught him what would have taken a decade to learn somewhere else. When a company is against the ropes, he explains, priorities become much more basic: pay salaries, pay taxes and make sure the business stays open.
Amon believes the center of gravity is now shifting. For the past fifteen years, almost everything revolved around the phone. A smartwatch, for example, mainly existed to extend it: it sent sensor data and received notifications. That made it logical for the company making the phone to also make many of the accessories around it.
Now he believes the agent will take that central role. The phone will not disappear —he makes that point often, and it is also in his interest to do so— but it will stop organizing everything else around it.
That changes the structure of the market. When the phone is at the center, one company often controls the main device and much of the surrounding ecosystem. With the agent at the center, devices can connect with one another without depending as heavily on a single manufacturer. That creates room for companies that have never even made electronics before.
Amon is convinced this is the year agents begin to take center stage. He is even willing to put a deadline on it: before the Northern Hemisphere summer, he says, every major operating system provider will have announced some form of orchestrator.
He puts it simply: agents will become the new applications, and orchestrators will become the new app stores.
He uses a banking app as an example. Today, someone decides in advance what the user will see, in what order, what colors will be used and what information appears first. Amon believes that can change. If an agent has access to your credentials, you could ask for your balance, your last three transactions or a chart and, if you do not like the way it looks, ask the agent to change it. The application stops being a finished product and starts assembling itself around what you need at that moment.
He also imagines the next phone operating in two different ways: it remains a device you control yourself, but it can also be operated by an agent that does things on your behalf.
Glasses
Of all the new device categories, there is one Amon is particularly confident about: glasses. He says they occupy valuable real estate because they sit close to the eyes, ears and mouth, and they see what you see when you turn your head.
Tens of millions are sold every year today. He believes that could become hundreds of millions within a few years. For comparison, roughly 1.2 billion phones are sold annually.
Everything else is still taking shape. He mentions forty different designs Qualcomm is working on: pendants, pins, watches, earbuds with cameras and even something resembling an alarm clock you can talk to. As for the pin that failed a few years ago, his explanation is mostly about timing: it arrived before agents, and without something that could actually perform tasks for you, it was little more than a camera with a microphone.
Amon believes there is another point that remains underestimated. Today’s models learned from everything humanity has digitized: books, emails, websites and posts. But if millions of people begin walking around wearing glasses that can see what they see, the amount of information being generated could increase enormously.
For Amon, that explains much of the interest AI companies have in controlling devices. The real prize is not necessarily the device itself, but the data it can generate.
What he does not answer
It is worth noting where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
The journalist asked him twice about privacy. The second time the question was direct: you are describing a world where everyone records everything all the time. Does that not worry you?
Amon did not really answer. He talked about an emerging technology, the amount of regulation that will come, the need for user permission and how adoption will happen on a case-by-case basis.
Earlier, he had offered a more commercial argument: if a device is going to see and hear much of what you do, you will probably want it to come from a company you trust. It is the argument one would expect from someone selling exactly that kind of technology.
Memory
The immediate problem, by contrast, he acknowledges without hesitation. When asked about supply constraints, Amon started with a joke that captures the situation fairly well: “If you have memory, I’ll buy it.”
He says installed capacity simply is not enough for current demand. While much of the industry believes conditions will not normalize until 2028, he is betting on the second half of 2027.
From that he draws another conclusion: the devices we use today were not designed for what is coming. That is why Qualcomm is reworking almost its entire road map.
There is also a technical detail with business consequences: orchestrators run on the central processor rather than the graphics processor. After years in which GPUs received almost all the attention, that gives the CPU a more important role again.
One in the United States, one in China
The other major bet is the data center, where Qualcomm is arriving late and going directly against Nvidia.
Amon admits that if he could go back, he would have started the plan several years earlier. At the time, he had other priorities and Qualcomm did not yet have everything it needed. Now he wants to offer the complete package, from silicon to software, while keeping the ecosystem open.
That is why the company acquired Modular. Amon says the goal is to create something similar to what Android did in smartphones: an open alternative to a closed ecosystem.
On customers, he gave some names and left others vague. He mentioned Meta for central processors, Microsoft for a computing technology that avoids high-bandwidth memory, and two major cloud providers he would not identify: one in the United States and one in China.
That last point takes him into more difficult territory. Amon accompanied Donald Trump to his meeting with Xi Jinping and argues that maintaining trade with China also contributes to stability.
His argument is simple, although it is framed in a way that points toward the answer he prefers: is it better to have American technology only for the United States, or American technology for the entire world? When the journalist pointed out that the question already assumed one answer was obvious, Amon said that for him it simply comes down to the size of the market.
Five years, two shortages
There is a parallel Amon does not make himself, but it helps explain his first five years as CEO.
He took over in 2021 during the global chip shortage, when Qualcomm was also coming out of a legal battle and had survived a hostile takeover attempt. In that environment, he made a risky decision: accelerate the transition to 5G by two years, precisely when chips were harder than ever to obtain.
Five years later, he is facing another shortage, this time in memory, and once again his response is to accelerate: a new business line, a rewritten road map and an entry into a market where the main competitor has years of advantage.
It fits someone who describes his job as stepping back into the arena, again and again.
