What Happened?
Shares of wireless chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) jumped 3.4% in the afternoon session after President Trump announced Apple had agreed to design and manufacture chips with Intel in the United States, a foundry validation the market had been waiting on for over a year.
The deal served as a direct catalyst for Intel and lifted sentiment across the industry. Micron also added 7-8% after a coordinated wave of analyst price target hikes. Stifel, Wedbush, Deutsche Bank, and TD Cowen revised their models sharply higher reinforced by Apple CEO Tim Cook's acknowledgement that memory price increases have become unavoidable.
The macro backdrop also helped. The US and Iran released the text of a signed interim agreement extending the April ceasefire by 60 days, a development that Art Hogan of B Riley Wealth described as "usurping any negative sentiment brought about by a more hawkish Fed yesterday." Lower oil prices eased the inflation pressure that sent the market lower earlier in the week; for a sector carrying high multiples that compress when the risk-free rate rises, any relief on the rate-hike narrative matters.
The shares were trading at $223.78, up 4.7% from the previous close.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
Qualcomm’s shares are very volatile and have had 22 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 6 days ago when the stock gained 4.8% on the news that macro rate relief from the Iran peace deal, a Wells Fargo price target increase, and positive positioning ahead of a June 24 Investor Day drove renewed market interest.
The macro backdrop was the same force lifting the entire chip sector. Oil fell another 4% as Trump's Iran deal announcement from the previous day gained credibility, pulling Treasury yields lower and expanding the multiples that future-earnings chips trade on.
Qualcomm had fallen 26% from its 2026 peak through June 10, hit by Nvidia's RTX Spark competing in the Windows on Arm PC market and by regulatory fears over its ByteDance AI chip deal, and seemed to be reclaiming some of that ground alongside AMD and broader semiconductors.
Also, Wells Fargo raised its price target to $230 from $160, citing growing confidence in the data centre opportunity ahead of June 24. The driver is Qualcomm's AI100 Ultra, now available through AWS, which Wells Fargo says carries competitive revenue per GPU hour versus other cloud AI products. JPMorgan is separately on positive catalyst watch, expecting the Investor Day to outline data centre revenue targets exceeding $3 billion in fiscal 2027 and $35 billion by fiscal 2031.
CEO Cristiano Amon confirmed at the Bernstein conference on May 27 that custom ASIC shipments, originally targeted for fiscal 2027, have been pulled into calendar year 2026. Asked what "material" data centre revenue means at Qualcomm's scale, Amon was direct: "Material has to be in the multiple billions of dollars.".
Qualcomm is up 29.4% since the beginning of the year, but at $223.78 per share, it is still trading 10.9% below its 52-week high of $251.02 from May 2026. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Qualcomm’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $1,683.
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