Qualcomm CEO: AI firms want 100B-parameter models running on phones by 2028
Speaking on Alex Heath's Sources podcast, recorded at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui and published on 8 October, CEO Cristiano Amon said some companies at the forefront of AI have told Qualcomm they need "the ability to run at least a hundred billion parameter model into a phone" by 2028, running "kind of all the time," though he would not name them. Amon said AI companies are starting to make phones, citing ByteDance's Doubao phone made by Nubia, and argued the phone holds a user's personal context, sensor data and the apps an agent must operate — with OpenClaw making the AI smartphone idea concrete. He also said memory prices have risen five to six times and the smartphone market is down 20% this year with mid-range and cheaper devices hit hardest, while discussing smart glasses, open-sourcing the Modular platform under Apache 2.0 for any chip, and 6G demos planned for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
If 100B-parameter models could truly run persistently on phones, it would reshape how agents are deployed and raise device compute and memory demands — but for now it is a customer request, not a shipping product.