Computex 2026 Day 2 – All about the edge

AI will run at the edge wherever possible

Qualcomm – More datacentre, please.

• Although Qualcomm disappointed the market by not giving more details of its datacentre products, it is clear from listening to everyone else that a good proportion of the AI market is going to fall right in its lap regardless.
• Agents is the buzzword of Computex 2026, and here, everyone seems to agree that they make the most sense when they run on edge devices and not in the cloud.
• This is because this is where they are most economical to run, where they can be more private as well as fully personalised to the user.
• This is being made clear at Computex 2026, where Nvidia has set the tone with the launch of a laptop processor for just this use case and where Qualcomm gave numerous examples of agents working in all sorts of edge devices.
• These range from vehicles to PCs to wearables such as glasses and rings, and in all of these Qualcomm has a credible, if not dominant, position.
• Hence, regardless of whatever happens in the data centre, Qualcomm and MediaTek will benefit from higher demand for compute at the edge, which, with their power-efficient processors, they are well placed to deliver.
• However, all attention at the moment remains on the data centre, and it was clear that the market was hoping for a bit more detail from Qualcomm than just the Dragonfly branding.
• These details should be forthcoming at the investor day on June 24, at which time spreadsheets will be updated, and earnings estimates for fiscal 2027 and 2028 should begin rising.
• The PER re-rating of Qualcomm has now happened, but with one or two hyperscalers and Humain buying data centre chips, I think that there is further to go in terms of rising estimates and share price appreciation.
• I remain a happy holder.

Arm – Sweet spot.

• A solid and highly amusing keynote again made the point that CPU demand continues to increase both in the data centre and the edge of the network.
• Arm’s AGI CPU greatly increases its addressable market, but the fact that the shares are up 4x since announcing the product in March, leads one to wonder whether or not it is already in the price.
• Rene Haas was in his element on stage but had to endure teasing from Jensen about how, when Nvidia launches a product, it is Arm’s stock price that goes up.
• This added an amusing note to Arm’s keynote, which increased long-term expectations for CPU demand as a result of agentic AI.
• In March, Arm stated that it thought that the market for AI CPU would be around $100bn by 2030, but already, this number is looking low with Arm guiding the number up by an undisclosed order of magnitude.
• Just like everyone else, the discussion is around agents and how they will drive demand for compute, particularly on all types of edge devices.
• This adds weight to RFM’s opinion that inference at the edge is a major theme in the AI boom, which now looks to be getting greater traction.
• I am still dubious about whether users want AI on their PC user experience, but as a place to run a personalised agent activated from a smartphone, glasses or vehicle, it is a strong contender.
• This combined with the explosion in coding being driven by Claude is what underpins the RTX Spark, where Arm is a major beneficiary as the CPU in this SoC has 20 Arm cores.
• How many of these laptops it will sell is very uncertain given that it is going to be a very expensive product, which is why it does not threaten the existing status quo in the PC processor market.
• The good news is that it doesn’t really matter where the compute happens, as Arm cores are popping up everywhere (mostly at Intel’s expense), meaning that it will collect the revenue regardless of where the majority of compute ends up happening.
• As a result, the growth story for Arm continues to strengthen, but the share price seems to have beaten me to it.