Qualcomm CEO says frontier AI labs want phones running a 100B-parameter model all the time by 2028, and some are starting to build phones

Why it matters

【Key points】

On the October 8 episode of Alex Heath's Sources podcast, recorded at Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said some companies "at the forefront of AI" are asking Qualcomm to let phones run a model of at least 100 billion parameters by 2028, running "kind of all the time." He named no one, but said AI companies are starting to make phones. He also expects AI agents to drive a smartphone upgrade cycle, is most bullish on smart glasses, and laid out a 6G timeline with demos at the 2028 LA Olympics.

【Verifiable】

The episode page says AI companies are asking Qualcomm to support at least 100B-parameter models on phones by 2028 with AI always running, and that soaring memory prices have held back upgrades. The transcript has the quote. Several reports say Qualcomm's newest flagship runs about a 30B model on-device. The page notes coming devices from AI companies like OpenAI use Qualcomm chips. The clip was re-shared widely on X over 24 hours, the top post near 300,000 views.

【Our read】

What matters is that this is a demand from frontier labs, not Qualcomm's roadmap: they want a resident model in the pocket. The bottleneck is memory, not compute. Even at 4 bits, 100B weights is about 50GB, and "always running" means resident in RAM and drawing power. Amon admits memory prices already suppress upgrades, the same constraint. Our guess is that sparse mixture-of-experts models with weights paged from flash are the realistic path; Qualcomm gave no plan. Discount it too: Qualcomm sells chips, the requesters are unnamed and 2028 is nobody's commitment. Watch for a lab publishing on-device model specs.