Qualcomm’s CEO is working with ‘pretty much all’ major AI players on top-secret devices—and powering OpenAI’s first push into hardware

Cristiano Amon won’t tell you what’s coming, but he’ll tell you who’s building it. “There are some secret form factors that I cannot tell you about,” the Qualcomm CEO said in an interview with Fortune Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “But I think we’re working with pretty much all of them.” “Pretty much all of them,” in this case, means the AI companies racing to build the device that replaces the smartphone. OpenAI, Meta, and others that Amon declined to name in an interview from the company’s San Diego headquarters. This device won’t be something you can hold; it’ll be “things you wear”: glasses, jewelry, pins, pendants. And it’ll center on the idea that the center of digital life will no longer be a phone but an autonomous agent. The interview was recorded before TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported in late April that Qualcomm and MediaTek are jointly designing a custom chip for an OpenAI smartphone, with Luxshare manufacturing it. Kuo projected mass production in 2028 and shipments of 300 to 400 million units annually, a number that would put OpenAI in iPhone territory for hardware scaling. Qualcomm shares jumped as much as 13% following the report, though neither company confirmed it. One problem with that initial report: a smartphone doesn’t track with what Amon said about non-phone hardware. And a more recent Kuo note, dated May 5, says the phone chip may now go to MediaTek alone, with mass production fast-tracked to early 2027. Whatever happens to Qualcomm’s spot on that specific device, Amon’s framing is bigger than any one chip: Qualcomm will provide the silicon underneath AI’s push into consumer hardware, period. The “ecosystem of you” Amon’s pitch is that the smartphone-centric world Qualcomm helped build is coming to an end. In its place, he describes what he calls the “ecosystem of you&#82