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........

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