Qualcomm Sold Server Chips Once Before and Quit Within a Year. History Says What Has to Be Different This Time.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) said on Tuesday that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) could buy up to $60 billion of its server chips and related technology over the next decade. The two companies plan to co-develop multiple generations of customized silicon for Amazon Web Services' data centers, starting with chips built for AI (artificial intelligence) inference (the day-to-day work of running already-trained AI models). Shares of the chipmaker rose 3% on the announcement.

But Qualcomm has been here before. In November 2017, the company announced commercial shipment of its Centriq 2400, billed as the world's first 10-nanometer server processor.

Within six months, Bloomberg reported that the company was preparing to give up on the business. By the end of 2018, Qualcomm was cutting the data center group from a peak of more than 1,000 people to about 50.

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