Qualcomm CEO at COMPUTEX: Tokens are the 'New Currency' of AI, Demand to Surge 40x in 5 Years

Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano R. Amon opened his COMPUTEX keynote today by expressing gratitude to Taiwanese partners like TSMC, stating that token demand will surge 40 times from 2026 to 2030, and that tokens will be the 'new currency' of artificial intelligence (AI). While thanking suppliers and development partners, Amon specifically thanked TSMC, emphasizing that TSMC has been a great partner for Qualcomm throughout its journey. He also thanked the ecosystem for driving technological progress through collaboration. Amon stated that AI is advancing a new form of computing, affecting every device. AI development will reach an astonishing scale, no longer just a tool for assisting work or interacting with computers, but capable of autonomous action. He said that while he previously mentioned smartphones were the center of digital life, the situation is different now; all devices will become the center of digital experience, and agentic AI will not be limited by a single ecosystem. Amon noted that there are currently about 6 billion smartphones and 2 billion wearable devices worldwide, which is only a fraction of smart terminals. Additionally, there are 2 billion PCs and 500 million connected cars that people interact with. AI will be distributed across the cloud and devices, requiring powerful and energy-efficient CPUs to orchestrate tasks, as well as energy-efficient and high-compute-density NPUs and GPUs to run models. Amon said that automobiles, robots, and industrial systems will also be important application areas for AI, where latency and safety requirements are critical. In robotics, there are three layers of computing power: first, real-time execution; second, motion; and third, inference. He pointed out that 6G is fundamentally about connecting everything, enabling 'what you see is what you get' application scenarios, with computing and sensing being key pillars. The entire network itself will be an AI network, distributing AI computing and inference from wireless base stations to data centers. Amon stated that with the development of agentic AI, each task requires about 1 million tokens. He estimates that by 2026, global token demand every 10 seconds will be about 31.7 billion, and by 2030, it will increase 40 times to 1.27 trillion. Amon said that agentic AI has arrived, which will change massive computing methods and create huge demand for new types of devices and computing. This upgrade could be the largest in the industry. Qualcomm will launch 'Dragonfly' to enter the server rack market, with more information to be released on June 24.