- Qualcomm beat Q2 earnings with adjusted EPS of $2.65, but Q3 revenue guidance of $9.2B to $10B missed Wall Street's $10.26B estimate.
- CEO Cristiano Amon confirmed Qualcomm will ship custom data center chips to a large unnamed hyperscaler in December 2026, triggering the 16% after-hours stock surge.
- Handset revenue fell 13% year-over-year to $6.02B as Chinese OEMs cut chip orders, but Qualcomm called Q3 the firm's bottom for China Android sales.
There’s a specific reason Qualcomm's tech stock showed up everywhere on April 29, Wednesday night. The company, which makes the processors and wireless chips inside most of the world's Android smartphones, dropped its Q2 earnings after market close and produced one of the most dramatic single-night stock swings in the chip industry this year.
Its stock fell nearly 7% the moment the numbers hit. Then, on the live earnings call, CEO Cristiano Amon said something that hadn’t been said publicly before. And within minutes, the stock was climbing back up. By the end of after-hours trading, it had surged 16% from its drop. Investors who stayed on the call were rewarded. Those who sold on the headline print weren’t.
On the earnings call, Amon had already signalled what was coming. "We are in a period of profound industry transformation," he told analysts. "The rise of AI agents is reshaping our roadmap across every platform we develop." That line told the room this wasn’t a standard quarterly update.
Here is everything that happened, by the numbers.
MORE INSIGHTS ON THIS TOPIC:
- Qualcomm struggles to keep pace in the AI boom as it reports loss in Q4 FY2025
- Qualcomm rolls out new AI chips to compete with AMD and Nvidia
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Says AGI Is Here — What Does He Mean?
