How is Qualcomm the best-performing chip stock right now, with over 40% gain this week?

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has become the loudest name in the chip trade this week, surging by 12% on Friday to make it a 40.3% rally for the week, and is now up about 75% over the past month, breaking all-time highs after all-time highs.

Meanwhile, the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) hit its first intraday record since May 11 on Friday, according to data from Yahoo Finance. That came after a three-day rally, which followed a three-day drop that started late last week.

Qualcomm uses phones, glasses, cars, and robots to chase the physical AI trade

To be perfectly clear, Qualcomm is not beating Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) in the giant AI training-chip race. Nvidia still owns the main stage for GPUs used in big AI systems and cloud workloads, but

Qualcomm is using its phone-chip power to get deeper into devices that run AI close to the user.

That is where the “physical AI” story comes in.

The company’s chips are being tied to devices people can hold, wear, drive, or put inside machines like smartphones, eyeglasses, cars, robots, and PCs.

More companies now want AI to work directly on devices, an area is often called edge AI. Qualcomm is already tied to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Surface PCs, plus smart glasses from Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META).

Its Arm-based chips also give device makers a lower-power option compared with processors from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD).

OpenAI is also reportedly working with Qualcomm on an AI chip for a coming device that could run AI agents.

Qualcomm also has new data center chips coming. The company announced the AI200 and AI250 last year. These are custom AI accelerators, not normal phone chips.

They are meant to be more programmable than the GPUs that Nvidia has used to dominate AI workloads so far. The chips are expected to arrive later this year in a full rack-scale system, similar in format to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin setup and AMD’s coming Helios system.

Trump’s quantum funding plan puts Qualcomm inside another risky government-backed trade

Qualcomm is also part of the quantum computing story, which is getting more attention after the Trump administration backed a major federal funding plan for the sector.

The U.S. government plans to put $2 billion into nine quantum computing companies through funding drawn from the CHIPS and Science Act, as Cryptopolitan previously reported. Qualcomm secured $100 million from the quantum funding pool.

The law was passed by Congress and signed by former President Joe Biden in 2022, but the awards are now being handled under Trump’s administration, using congressionally approved money in a way that is legally risky.

The company also has an AI research lab working on the link between quantum computing and artificial intelligence. One recent paper, titled The Hintons in your Neural Network: a Quantum Field Theory View of Deep Learning, said researchers “develop a quantum field theory formalism for deep learning” using Gaussian states to represent input signals.

Precedence Research expects the quantum computing market to grow from $10.13 billion in 2022 to $125 billion by 2030, with a 36.9% compound annual growth rate.

McKinsey has called quantum computing “one of the next big trends” in technology and estimates quantum technology could create about $1.3 trillion in value by 2035.

McKinsey also expects only about 5,000 operational quantum computers by 2030, while the hardware and software needed for the hardest problems may not arrive until 2035 or later.

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