Qualcomm at 26 times next year's earnings, pricier than Nvidia's 15

Qualcomm is one of the world's largest mobile chipmakers, but it is rarely mentioned alongside AI leaders like Nvidia and Broadcom. Its AI-oriented chips have not attracted nearly as much attention as Nvidia's data center GPUs or Broadcom's custom AI accelerators for hyperscalers. That gap shows in the numbers: Qualcomm's stock rose 40% over the past five years, while Nvidia and Broadcom rallied about 1,000% and 630% respectively.

The reason may lie in where each company sells. Qualcomm's main AI push is edge AI, adding on-device processing to its Snapdragon chips, which power mobile devices, wearables, vehicles, and PCs. These chips primarily target budget-constrained consumer device manufacturers, which limits pricing power and the total addressable market. Nvidia and Broadcom, by contrast, sell to hyperscalers that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on cloud-based AI infrastructure. Qualcomm is trying to expand into the data center market with its Cloud AI 100 and next-gen AI accelerators for inference tasks, but it may struggle to stand out in a crowded market.

Growth expectations reinforce that divide. Analysts project Qualcomm's revenue and EPS will grow at CAGRs of 6% and 27% from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2028, while Nvidia's are seen growing at 61% and Broadcom's at 62% and 80%, though such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. Meanwhile, Qualcomm trades at 26 times next year's earnings, above Nvidia's 15 and Broadcom's 22. Unless Qualcomm makes more progress in the data center market, that combination of slower expected growth and a higher multiple may keep investors favoring its larger AI peers.