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Qualcomm gave Amazon $4 billion in stock warrants to bet against Nvidia
Qualcomm is giving Amazon warrants on 25 million of its own shares. If AWS actually buys the chips, that paper turns real. On September 8, Qualcomm and Amazon Web Services announced a multi-generation partnership to build custom silicon for AI inference, backed by an unusual financial structure: Qualcomm issued warrants letting Amazon buy 25 million Qualcomm shares at $161.26 apiece, a stake worth roughly $4 billion at signing. The warrants expire in September 2036. According to CNBC, 3.75 million of those shares vest immediately, with the rest tied to milestones, chiefly AWS following through on purchases of up to $60 billion in Qualcomm server chips and related technology over time. That's the part worth sitting with. Nvidia sells Amazon chips. Qualcomm is paying Amazon, in its own equity, to actually deploy them. Wall Street liked what it saw. Qualcomm shares jumped as much as 9.5% on the announcement, according to Yahoo Finance, before settling into high single digits. For a company that's spent years trying to convince data center buyers it belongs in the same conversation as Nvidia and AMD, that's the kind of one-day move that changes how seriously people take the pitch. Warrants aren't how chip deals normally...