Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon gives a keynote speech at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan on May 19, 2025.
Anne Wang | Reuters
BARCELONA, Spain — Robotics will represent a “bigger opportunity” for the world. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC that the semiconductor giant will continue to expand beyond smartphones.
In January, Qualcomm launched a robot processor under the Dragonwing brand, aiming to develop a chipset that can work with multiple robot platforms. It’s a similar approach the company has taken for smartphones, and its Snapdragon processors have become the primary chips used by electronics companies.
“I think robotics will start to scale within the next two years,” Amon told CNBC on Monday in response to a question about when robotics will become a significant business for Qualcomm.
“I think it’s going to be an even bigger opportunity within two years,” he added in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Robots come in many varieties, from those focused on industrial applications, such as robotic arms, to humanoid robots of the type being developed by Tesla and a number of Chinese companies.
There are various predictions about the size of the robot market. McKinsey predicts that the market for general-purpose robots could reach $370 billion by 2040, while analysts at RBC Capital Markets predict the total global humanoid market will reach $9 trillion by 2050.
Making a robot work requires a processor and a lot of difficult engineering. However, the growing bullishness on robotics is driven by advances in AI models. These models are designed to power robots so that they can understand the world around them and act accordingly. Robots are often talked about in a category called physical AI.
“People are saying that robotics alone could be a trillion-dollar opportunity in terms of market size…The reality is that we now know that robots have become much more useful because of physical AI,” Amon said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last year that robotics is one of the company’s key sources of potential growth.
Robotics is a major theme at Mobile World Congress, with a variety of robots on display. On Sunday, Chinese smartphone player Honor teased its first humanoid robot.
