AI boom won't lead to global chip shortage, says Qualcomm CEO Amon

By Henrique Almeida 

Qualcomm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon said the artificial intelligence boom won’t lead to a global chip shortage similar to what happened during the pandemic, even with demand for AI-enabled smartphones rising. 

“During the pandemic everybody was home and started buying consumer electronics,” he said at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon on Tuesday. “It was good for the business, but the supply chain was not able to handle.” Since then, he added, “a lot” of investment has been made to increase the production capacity of chips. 

“Today, demand and supplies are a hundred percent balanced within semiconductors,” he said. 

 

There has been a boom in state-backed investment into semiconductor production around the world following shortages during the pandemic, as governments have announced subsidies to promote an essential industry. This week, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba pledged more than $65 billion of fresh support for the nation’s semiconductor and AI sector in an attempt to keep pace with the US, EU and China. 

Qualcomm, the world’s biggest seller of smartphone processors, last week gave a bullish sales forecast for the current quarter. Amon said demand for smartphone processors will continue to grow as users upgrade to more technically advanced phones that offer AI features.  

“Users when they think about buying their next phone, they want to buy a better phone,” Amon said at the conference on Tuesday. “We have seen that consistently and I expect that the capabilities of having processing of AI and AI use cases are actually going to continue to accelerate that trend.”