Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside anything that replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products that aim to do that

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday the company is working on 40 different wearable AI devices — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next big computing platform won’t be the phone.

To enable that vision, Qualcomm announces two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses, designed to harness the additional power of AI devices, and the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and a software stack for AI devices, starting with smart glasses.

Compared to its previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite brings improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company. Percentage gains in chip specifications may be difficult to quantify, but Qualcomm provides one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3 billion parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for fast, responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the chip will also enable better head and hand tracking, as well as improved vision.

The Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K resolution per eye at 90 fps, a slight bump from the XR2+ Gen 2’s 4.3K resolution per eye. (The higher the height of each eye and the frame rate, the sharper and smoother the visual, which is very important in reducing the motion sickness and eye strain that has historically made using extended headphones uncomfortable.)

Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: stand-alone video-see-through (VST) earphones, which overlay digital content on top of a real-world camera feed, and lightweight, bonded optical-see-through (OST) glasses, which combine a digital image directly into your field of view. Among the first devices to use it: the XREAL Project Aura, shown at Google I/O earlier this year, and the upcoming device from Play for Dream.

START, meanwhile, consists of an AR chip, a software platform, compatible applications, and a white-label program intended to help hardware makers get to market faster. With the white label program, the company offers three reference designs: an audio + camera setup similar to Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display.

Eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O’Neill – owned by TitanFlex – will be among the first partners in the white label scheme. Qualcomm said START will expand beyond smart glasses to support other form factors in the future.

Amon’s comments, made to CNBC, reveal the strategic thinking behind both announcements. He pointed out that as companies seek to collect more real-world data from users to power their AI agents, a new wave of hardware innovations will emerge, which will have a major impact on popular smartphone players such as Apple and Samsung.

“I think there will be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” said Amon. “Right now, we have more than 40 designs for those devices, and I can tell you, the types of form factors are very wide.” He added, “A routine is something you wear, something [that] it’s with you all the time, something that can see the world around you, so you have context and you have the ability to reach the agent and talk to the agent.”

To that end, Qualcomm is clearly positioning itself as the basic silicon layer for anything that comes behind a smartphone. The START white label program, in particular, is designed to lower the barrier for new entrants.