Is Qualcomm on a Tear? Inside QCOM's 2026 Comeback — and the ETFs That Hold the Most

Whether or not Qualcomm is on a run depends entirely on your time frame. QCOM's 2026 performance has been a rollercoaster rather than a straight-line rally. The stock bottomed near $122 in April, then surged to an all-time high of roughly $260 in May — a monster move off the lows — before sliding about 35% into late July as the market fretted about a slowdown in its core smartphone-chip business.

The more recent story is a genuine re-acceleration. After dipping to a post-earnings low near $148 in August, QCOM worked its way back to about $169 by Sept. 4 and jumped again on Sept. 8, trading near $176 on the Amazon news. So: over the past month, yes, Qualcomm is on the move again, and off its April low it has been spectacular. But the stock still sits roughly 30% below its May record, and the year has been defined by volatility, not steady momentum. The bull case is that the recent rally is the start of the next leg — not a dead-cat bounce.

The catalyst reshaping Qualcomm's story is its move beyond smartphones, and on Sept. 8, 2026, that story got its biggest headline yet. Qualcomm announced a multi-generational collaboration with Amazon to supply custom silicon for Amazon Web Services' AI data centers, with the work centered on AI inference and extending to optical networking products. Qualcomm also issued Amazon a warrant covering about 25 million QCOM shares at an exercise price of $161.26 — roughly $4 billion if fully exercised over the next decade — and the stock rallied on the announcement.

That agreement builds on the engagement Qualcomm first disclosed earlier in the year. On its Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings call in April, Qualcomm revealed its first hyperscaler data center deal — and the stock jumped 15%. For a company long viewed as a mobile-chip pure play tied to the maturing smartphone cycle, breaking into the AI data center market is a potentially transformative diversification of its revenue.

Several other growth engines are firing at once. Qualcomm's IoT segment — which spans AI PCs, smart glasses, and industrial devices — brought in $1.7 billion in the April quarter, up 9% year over year, and automotive has been the standout, growing 61% in the June quarter. A reported partnership with OpenAI and MediaTek to develop smartphone processing chips (with mass production targeted for 2028) also sent shares up double digits earlier in the year. The financials show why the debate persists, though: Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue of $10.6 billion and non-GAAP EPS of $2.65 beat estimates, but the most recent quarter — Q3 fiscal 2026, reported July 29 — delivered revenue of $9.9 billion, down 4% year over year, and non-GAAP EPS of $2.21, which missed Wall Street's forecast.