Qualcomm wants to be the chip in everything that replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products to do just that

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on Tuesday that the company is working on more than 40 different wearables with artificial intelligence, including jewelry, headphones with cameras, pins and watches, a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next big computing platform won’t be a phone at all.

To enable this vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses, designed to run more powerful AI on the device, 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 the previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite offers up to 60% more GPU performance, up to 30% more CPU performance, and up to 160% more NPU performance, according to the company. The percentage gain in the chip’s performance can be difficult to contextualize, but Qualcomm offers one specific data point, saying that the platform can run a language model with 3 billion parameters at 45 tokens per second – fast enough for rapid interaction with artificial intelligence. Qualcomm says the chip will also allow for better head and hand tracking, as well as improved transparency capabilities.

Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K resolution per eye at 90 fps, a modest difference from the 4.3K resolution per eye in the XR2+ Gen 2. (The higher the resolution per eye and frame rate, the sharper and smoother the visual experience, which is most important for reducing the motion sickness and eye strain that have historically made prolonged use of the headset uncomfortable.)

Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: standalone video transparent headsets (VSTs) that overlay digital content on a real-world camera, and lightweight tethered optically transparent (OST) glasses that blend digital images directly into the field of view. Among the first devices to use it are the XREAL Project Aura shown at Google I/O earlier this year and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.

Meanwhile, START consists of an augmented reality chip, a software platform, companion applications and a white-label program aimed at helping hardware manufacturers get to market faster. Through its white label program, the company offers three reference designs: audio + camera similar to Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display.

TitanFlex-owned eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O’Neill will be among the first partners in the White Label program. Qualcomm said START will expand beyond smart glasses to support other form factors in the future.

Amon’s comments, done for CNBCspecify the strategic logic of both announcements. He argued that as companies seek to collect more real-world user data to power their AI agents, there will be a new wave of hardware startups creating new form factors, with major implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung.

“I think there will be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said. “We have over 40 designs of these devices right now, and I’m telling you, the form factors are very, very broad.” He added that “the principle is something that you carry, something (that) is with you all the time, something that the world around you can see, so that you have context and you have the ability to access the agent and talk to the agent.”

To that end, Qualcomm is clearly positioning itself as the foundational layer of silicon for what comes after the smartphone. The White Label START program, in particular, is designed to lower the barrier for new entrants.