Qualcomm unveils flagship phone chips with local 30-billion-parameter AI support

Image: Primary

Published Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · 5:08 PM EDT

Qualcomm announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processors for flagship smartphones. Both include sensing hubs that can run models with as many as 200 million parameters for functions such as speaker recognition and personal task memory. Qualcomm says the Extreme version can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model locally by activating only part of the model for each task. Motorola plans to use the Extreme chip in its Signature 27 phone, with general availability sometime this year. Real-world speed, power use and model performance were not provided.

Sources

TechCrunch

Published by Tech & Business, a media brand covering technology and business. This story was sourced from TechCrunch and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.

Back to Newswire

Keep reading

Full wire

AI Infrastructure

Nvidia releases Reshard implementation to speed reinforcement learning weight transfers

Nvidia has made an open source implementation of Reshard available to transfer updated model weights between training and inference GPUs. The company reports speedups of 2.7x to 5.7x over conventional gather-and-broadcast transfers in NeMo RL benchmarks.

Infrastructure AI

TSMC considers expanding into advanced memory manufacturing

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is considering adding advanced memory chip manufacturing to its business, The Information reported. Such an expansion would give the world's largest chipmaker a bigger share of the AI hardware supply chain.

AI Infrastructure

Musk says government work will fall below 10% of SpaceX revenue

Elon Musk said government contracts will account for less than 10% of SpaceX revenue this quarter, down from 16.6% in the third quarter, The Next Web reports. Renting AI computing has become its largest revenue source.

AI Infrastructure

Nvidia reports faster FLUX 3 image generation with VisualGen optimizations

Nvidia reported that combined runtime optimizations accelerated FLUX 3 Image Klein Base image generation on a single B200 GPU.

AI Infrastructure

Vercel adds DeepSeek search and page retrieval to AI Gateway

Vercel announced that DeepSeek Search and DeepSeek Fetch are available through AI Gateway for any model that supports tool calling. Developers can use one Gateway API key without creating a separate DeepSeek account and retain the tools when switching model providers.

Infrastructure AI

AWS adds amortized cost reporting for reserved GPU capacity

AWS now spreads the upfront cost of EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML across each reservation's duration in Cost Explorer and its Cost and Usage Report 2.0. Customers can see costs assigned to instances that used the reservation and costs attributable to unused capacity.