This year, the smartphone market faces a side effect of the pressure promoted by artificial intelligence processing on prices in the semiconductor industry: with more expensive chips, consumers will be pushed into premium phone categories, with more added technology.
The person making the diagnosis is Luiz Tonisi, president of Latin America at , a leader in the development of chips for smartphones globally.
“The cost of memory is rising, tripling or even multiplying by five times”, says the executive in an interview with InfoMoney. It turns out that the supply of memory chips is increasingly compromised while producers prefer to sell semiconductors to data centers, where the added value of processing devices is greater.
For higher-cost cell phones, such as iPhones or Samsung’s S line, it makes little difference: percentage-wise, the increase in the value of the chip is not as significant when a device can cost US$1,000 or, in Brazil, around R$10,000. The story is different for low to mid-cost smartphones.
“What we see is that there will be a ‘premiumisation’ of smartphones, because no one will want to make a device in which the memory is 50% of the cost of the cell phone”, points out Tonisi. He explains that the movement is also driven by more and more embedded technology, such as devices with artificial intelligence features, the consolidation of 5G and the advancement of cameras.
Qualcomm itself has been suffering from the impact of rising memory chip prices. Since the beginning of January 2026, the company’s shares traded on the Nasdaq have accumulated a drop of almost 35%, largely justified by expectations of a cooling in the smartphone market.
Continues after advertising
Two weeks ago, the company announced a US$20 billion share buyback program taking advantage of the drop in share prices. “While we continue to expand our technology and product leadership across multiple sectors, we remain focused on shareholder returns and executing on our ongoing diversification opportunities while maintaining operational discipline,” said company CEO Cristiano Amon at the time.
By 2029, the company hopes to reverse the contribution of its line of smartphone processors, which was already 90% of revenue, to 50%. Another 50% will come from the contribution of chips for automobiles, IoT devices (internet of things) and computers, sectors in which the company is already present.
Another bet is on data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence inference. These are smaller spaces closer to the consumer, where the processing load is dedicated not to executing language models, but to executing what has already been trained.
Continues after advertising
“If someone only depends on one product, even if we have a broad mobile portfolio, anything that happens in the segment directly impacts us”, says Tonisi. He says that Qualcomm enters all segments to compete for market leadership, “with a value proposition, not to be just another one”.
