As the auto industry stands at the cusp of transformation brought about by artificial intelligence and the growth of software-defined vehicles, semiconductor major Qualcomm is looking to take its technology to cars after mobiles and computers.

For the first time, the company dedicated an entire day as part of its flagship Snapdragon Summit to new chip releases forming part of its automotive platform, Snapdragon Digital Chassis. It also announced on Tuesday that its next-generation Oryon processor will now power in-car computer systems for entertainment and automated driving.

Qualcomm launched more powerful versions of its automated driving and digital cockpit platforms – the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite part of its Digital Chassis portfolio. The chipset is flexible and can be tailored by automakers to leverage features they’re most interested in. Automakers can use the Cockpit Elite to power digital immersive experiences inside the cars or Ride Elite to power automated driving capabilities.

The new Snapdragon Cockpit Elite is powered by the Oryon CPU, optimised for automotive applications and designed for a 3x performance increase compared with its previous generation. The processor supports infotainment and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) on a single SoC. It also has a Hexagon 12x neural processing unit (NPU) performance increase.

Though the auto chips will be available for sampling in 2025, the event saw executives from Mercedes Benz and Chinese auto major Li Auto throw their weight behind the offerings, with both also confirming that they will be putting the latest Snapdragon tech in their upcoming vehicles. Qualcomm also announced a partnership with Google to bring Gen AI capabilities to cars. With this partnership, automakers can now use a combination of Android Automotive OS and its own Digital Chassis tech to develop their own custom voice assistants.

“The car is now more than just mode of transportation. It is becoming a seamless extension of our digital lives,” Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s general manager of automotive, said. India has been a great market for Qualcomm and we have been engaging with OEMs since 2018, he added. “We have a team of over 20,000 people in India and our leaders there are currently in a good position to engage with India’s domestic auto makers for our automotive technologies,” he added.

The company is said to be in trials with various automakers for its chipsets and also has public partnerships for various auto tech solutions with Mahindra & Mahindra and others.

Speaking about Qualcomm’s outsized engineering team presence in India, Duggal said that India’s software talent has been an advantage in bringing  out customisation to the market, and there are around 1,500 people in Qualcomm’s India team working  on automotive technologies. “All our two-wheeler business is largely driven out of India because of the local expertise in that form of transport,” he added.

Qualcomm’s automotive revenues stood at $811 million in the June quarter. Given the size of the pipeline in the business, the company expects revenue of $4 billion in 2026 from this segment and around $9 billion in 2030. In the June quarter, Qualcomm reported over 10 new design wins with global automakers, including next-generation digital cockpit, connectivity, and/or ADAS and autonomy.



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