Qualcomm supplies the processor in most premium Android phones that are not made by Apple or Samsung, which makes its Hexagon NPU one of the most widely deployed AI accelerators in the world.
It is also the strongest single piece of evidence that the industry has quietly stopped competing on published numbers. Across fifteen generations of flagship Snapdragon 8 parts, Qualcomm has published zero TOPS figures. Every number you have seen attached to a Snapdragon NPU came from a reviewer, an analyst or a leak.
The company is now attempting something harder: taking a mobile NPU architecture and scaling it to rack-level data-centre inference, a market where the incumbent has a decade of software lock-in.