Who Owns Qualcomm?

Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, and five colleagues founded Qualcomm in San Diego in July 1985. The company's name derives from "Quality Communications." Its early business was the OmniTRACS satellite communications system for the trucking industry, which generated the cash flow to fund wireless research.

Qualcomm's defining achievement was commercializing CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), a spread-spectrum technique that packed far more calls into a slice of spectrum than competing approaches. CDMA became the basis for IS-95, or cdmaOne, networks in 1995 and underpinned 3G CDMA2000 and WCDMA standards worldwide. Qualcomm's patents on these standards made every mobile phone maker a licensee.

The company went public in 1991 and sold its phone handset business to Kyocera in 1999 to focus on chips and licensing. Through the 2000s and 2010s, Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors and modem chips dominated premium Android smartphones, while its patent licensing generated high-margin revenue from the entire industry.

Under Cristiano Amon, who took over in 2021, Qualcomm pushed into adjacent markets: automotive chips through the Snapdragon Digital Chassis, Windows laptops through Snapdragon X Elite processors (launched 2024), extended reality, robotics, and in 2025 a new data center AI accelerator line. Fiscal 2025 set records: $44.3 billion in revenue with automotive revenue up 36% to nearly $4 billion.