Qualcomm

Qualcomm was founded in San Diego in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and six colleagues, who set out to build "quality communications". It is still headquartered in San Diego, is listed on Nasdaq and holds one of the largest patent portfolios in wireless technology.

Its CDMA technology became the basis of 3G, and it now designs Snapdragon chips for smartphones, PCs, cars, XR headsets and IoT devices, together with 5G modems, Wi-Fi and the Oryon CPU cores. The Snapdragon Digital Chassis serves carmakers, the licensing business QTL licenses its patents, and with Alphawave Semi, bought in December 2025, it is moving into data centre connectivity.

According to its annual report for fiscal 2025, Qualcomm had about 52,000 full-time, part-time and temporary workers on September 28, 2025. Most engineering happens in San Diego, Santa Clara, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Shanghai, with further research and development centres in Cork, Munich, Sophia Antipolis, Toronto and Seoul, among others.