Qualcomm is taking its new data center ambitions to China — carefully.
According to Tom's Hardware, the company has announced that it will bring all four of its Dragonfly data center product lines to China. The catch: the China-bound lineup will include what Tom's Hardware calls "nerfed" AI accelerators, deliberately weakened so they fall under the performance thresholds set by US export controls. In other words, Qualcomm is engineering versions slow enough to be legally sold into the Chinese market.
The Dragonfly portfolio is central to a much larger bet. Qualcomm unveiled the lineup at an investor day and is targeting more than $15 billion in data center revenue by fiscal 2029, according to a Yahoo Finance report. That same report notes Qualcomm named Meta as a CPU customer — a notable early win as the chipmaker pushes deeper into the server market long dominated by others.
The move reflects a now-familiar balancing act in the semiconductor industry. US rules cap how powerful AI chips sold to China can be, so chipmakers design compliant, lower-performance variants to keep access to one of the world's biggest markets without running afoul of Washington.
For Qualcomm, best known for the chips inside smartphones, the strategy serves two goals at once: chasing a slice of the booming AI data center business while keeping a foothold in China.
Why it matters: Qualcomm's China-specific Dragonfly chips show how export controls are reshaping product design itself, pushing chipmakers to build deliberately limited hardware just to keep selling into the world's second-largest economy.