Cristiano Amon Tells Qualcomm Staff to Expect Job Cuts From November as Chipmaker Reshapes for AI

Cristiano Amon has spent much of his tenure as Qualcomm's chief executive arguing that the company's future lies beyond the smartphone. This week he made that argument personal for roughly 52,000 employees. In a memo to staff reported by Reuters, Amon said the San Diego chipmaker will begin notifying workers of job cuts from November, following its annual performance reviews. He did not put a number on the reductions — a silence that will do little to calm nerves inside a company where most staff are full-time and many have spent years riding the handset cycle.

The mechanics matter as much as the message. Amon framed the exercise around performance culture, saying the company must address cases where employees have "consistently fallen short of expectations," and that decisions will weigh business priorities, organisational needs and the skills required for the work ahead. "As we have expanded the business, so have the competencies and skills we require," he wrote, according to Reuters. In plain terms: Qualcomm is not simply trimming headcount, it is re-sorting its talent toward the businesses it believes will pay for the next decade.

For readers outside the chip industry, Qualcomm is best understood as the toll collector of the mobile era. Its processors and modem chips sit inside a vast share of the world's smartphones, and its patent licensing arm extracts royalties from handset makers across Asia — from Chinese device brands to Korean and Japanese manufacturers. That model made the company enormously profitable, but it also tied its fortunes to a consumer electronics market that has been soft, with rising memory prices squeezing the economics of device makers further up the supply chain. Qualcomm's shares have gained just 1.5% in 2026, against a rise of more than 12% for the S&P 500 and nearly 60% for the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index — a gap that tells you how impatient investors have become with the handset story.

The Apple problem sharpens the pressure. In its July earnings report, Qualcomm forecast quarterly profit below market estimates and warned that revenue from Apple-related products would decline faster than previously expected, as the iPhone maker brings more of its own silicon in-house. Losing a marquee customer is the kind of event that forces a board and a chief executive to rethink what the company is for. Amon's answer has been data centres and artificial intelligence — the same gravitational pull that has reorganised capital across Asia's technology supply chains, from Taiwan's server builders to Korean memory makers and the sprawling Chinese component ecosystem that feeds them. Qualcomm expects non-smartphone businesses to account for the majority of its chip sales by fiscal 2027, and believes growth in data centres and other segments will more than offset the lost Apple revenue by then.

That is a bold claim to make while cutting staff, and it captures a wider pattern in Asian and Asian-facing capital: the AI build-out is being financed partly by discipline elsewhere. Companies that grew fat on the smartphone boom are now being asked to fund a second act with the savings from the first. For employees in Qualcomm's offices from India to Korea to China, the November notifications will be the first concrete signal of how that trade-off is distributed. For investors, the question is whether a leaner, AI-focused Qualcomm can close the valuation gap with the semiconductor index that has left it behind.

Amon has staked his credibility on the pivot. The coming quarters will show whether the right people are in the right roles — his phrase — to deliver it.