Alphabet Discloses $548 Million Stake in Qualcomm as Chipmaker Pushes Into Data Centres

A quarterly filing shows Google's parent held almost 3 million Qualcomm shares at the end of September. Neither company has said why.

By Nakoda News Desk

17 hours ago·2 min read

Prefer Nakoda News on Google

Alphabet held 2,976,982 Qualcomm shares worth $547.9 million at the end of September, according to its latest quarterly holdings filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The position is new: Qualcomm did not appear in Alphabet's filing for the second quarter.

The 13F filing, submitted on November 6, shows holdings only as of September 30, the last day of the third quarter. It does not say when or why Alphabet bought the shares, or whether it has bought or sold any since. Neither company had commented in the reports on the filing.

The stake is small next to Qualcomm's market value, less than 1% of the company. It still matters because of the timing. Qualcomm is trying to build a data centre business as its smartphone chip sales weaken, and Google is both a long-time partner and a potential competitor in that market. Google designs its own data centre AI chips, its Tensor Processing Units, which compete with the products Qualcomm wants to sell.

Qualcomm shares rose more than 3% in premarket trading on Friday after the holding was reported, according to The Next Web.

The disclosure came days after a weak quarter for Qualcomm's core business. In its fiscal fourth quarter, revenue from its handsets unit, which makes smartphone chips, fell 26% from a year earlier to $5.1 billion. The company blamed weak demand. Qualcomm also forecast better-than-expected revenue from its data centre business. It said it expects its first revenue from custom data centre chips in the current quarter.

In the fiscal fourth-quarter results, chief executive Cristiano Amon repeated Qualcomm's target of $5 billion in data centre revenue in fiscal 2027, rising to more than $15 billion by fiscal 2029. The company unveiled the AI200 and AI250, its first chips designed to run AI models in data centres, in October 2025. It has since signed a custom AI chip deal with ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.

Alphabet and Qualcomm already work together in phones and cars. Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors power many Android handsets, and the two companies have widened a partnership on AI agents for vehicles that pairs Google Cloud's Gemini models with Qualcomm's automotive platform.

The same filing showed Alphabet's stake in SpaceX rising to about 555 million shares, from 551.2 million in the previous quarter. Google first invested in the company in 2015, when it joined Fidelity in a $1 billion funding round.

Large US investors file 13F reports every quarter, so Alphabet's next filing, due early next year, will show whether it has kept, added to or sold the Qualcomm shares.