Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon says some AI companies have told his firm they need a phone able to run a model of at least 100 billion parameters by 2028, “running kind of all the time.” He also said that “AI companies are starting to do phones.” Both claims come from one interview, and the second is the bigger one.
The interview was with Alex Heath on Heath’s podcast Sources, recorded at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui and published on 8 October, according to The Next Web’s report of 16 October. That makes it a chief executive talking at his own company’s event, not a filing or an earnings call.
The 2028 target is the customers’ wish as Amon relays it. He would not name the companies. Nothing in the report says Qualcomm has announced a chip or a phone that meets the target, so this is a supplier describing what buyers say they want, not a supplier promising to deliver it. A parameter is one of the stored numbers that make up a model, and every one has to sit in memory.
The phone claim is thinner than it sounds. Asked directly, Amon gave one example: ByteDance’s Doubao phone, made by Nubia, in China. “There’s more coming,” he said, and named no one else. The report does not say how much of the Doubao phone’s AI runs on the device itself. One named product supports the broader claim only loosely.
Then the arithmetic, which the interview does not do. Our calculation, not Amon’s: squeezing each parameter down to 4 bits, an aggressive level of compression, still puts 100 billion of them at about 50GB, before the phone runs anything else. Today’s phones carry a fraction of that in memory. The report names no path to closing the gap, and says nothing about battery or heat, though a model that runs “all the time” draws power all the time in a device with no fan.
What the report does contain points the other way. Amon blamed memory costs, which he put at five to six times their earlier level, for a 20% drop in the overall smartphone market this year. Cheaper and mid-range handsets took the worst of it, he said, while premium models held up. Elon Musk answered a post about the comments with “Problem is RAM supply.” The chief of the chip company is describing a future that needs far more memory in a year when memory is the scarce part.
One more fact belongs on the table: Qualcomm sells the chips such a phone would need. A chip executive describing large future on-device demand is describing his own order book. That does not make it false, and his argument for the handset, that it is where a person’s own context and sensor readings live, is real. It does mean the claim comes from a party that gains if it is believed.
Our observation, not the source’s: if AI companies do build their own phones, they stop renting distribution from Apple and Google. A lab whose assistant lives inside someone else’s operating system depends on that owner for reach and for the rules. That is the same strategic move as the plugin-as-distribution story elsewhere in today’s issue, pursued through hardware instead of through other companies’ platforms.
Until a named customer or a memory plan appears, 2028 is a wish relayed by a seller. The number to watch is the price of phone memory, because it decides whether the wish can be afforded.
Reported by The Next Web (Ana Maria Constantin) on 16 October 2026, from Alex Heath’s Sources podcast interview published 8 October 2026
