CES 2026: Qualcomm Expands Partnerships For More Snapdragons

From Google to Leapmotor and Renault to VW, the silicon and software giant is collecting quite the circle of friends.

January 30, 2026

Sebastian Blanco

Over 400 million vehicles are on the road today that have at least one feature of the Snapdragon Digital Chassis, like cockpit telematics, ADAS or cloud services, and Qualcomm SOCs. (Qualcomm)

Despite a noticeable turn away from the wall-to-wall automotive tech wizardary that was so prevalent in recent years and towards robots and other forms of “physical AI,” CES 2026 remained a good place for Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to deliver updates to the media on its various mobility-related technologies. Qualcomm invited SAE Media to Las Vegas to learn about the updates and cover other CES news in person.

Google partnership leads the way

Qualcomm used the 10-year anniversary of its collaboration with Google to announce it will work in new ways with the internet giant. Qualcomm will be a lead scaling partner for Android Automotive OS (AAOS) and will offer pre-optimized and integrated software with support for multiple domains in the vehicle, OTA support, and cloud-native development for OEMs using Snapdragon virtual SOCs running on Google Cloud.

Qualcomm’s CES announcements follow the company’s work on the BMW iX3, which debuted at IAA 2025 in September. The iX3 uses an AI-enabled Snapdragon Ride Pilot Automated Driving System, powered by Snapdragon Ride system-on-chips and a new jointly developed automated driving software stack. (Qualcomm)

This will speed up the development of next-generation experiences using cloud services that mirror the functionality of Snapdragon SOCs in a vehicle using a unified software stack across all vehicle tiers and generations. Google and Qualcomm are also establishing an end-to-end automatic technology solution framework that integrates Snapdragon digital chassis technologies with Google’s automotive software.

“What we’re building is a unified reference platform to accelerate the development cycles, strengthen quality assurance and streamline production of vehicles aligning with Android Automotive OS roadmaps, starting with Android 17,” said Ignacio Contreras, Qualcomm’s vice president of product marketing.

Qualcomm’s Mark Granger, vice president of Snapdragon Digital Cockpit at Qualcomm, told SAE Media that one challenge OS providers have is getting their software onto devices - in this case, vehicles - from multiple OEMs.

“When you take a look at bringing this OS to you know, 20, 30, 40 different OEMs that all utilize, perhaps, Snapdragon cockpit solutions, but then go into different vehicle architectures, it's quite a challenge,” Granger said. “Part of [what we’re doing] is really helping them as well as our OEMs to be able to get to market.”

Renault plans to deliver its first vehicle with the AAOS SDV system in 2026. There are over 400 million vehicles with at least one feature of the Snapdragon Digital Chassis on the road today, whether that’s cockpit telematics, ADAS or cloud services. This makes the company the top silicon provider for in-vehicle infotainment and cockpit systems, overall, Contreras said.

Qualcomm is also moving up the start of production – and commercial deployment – of the Snapdragon Ride Flex platform, which combines infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems on a single chip.

“This is very important to bring more cost effectiveness in terms of technology for the vehicles, and allow [OEMs] to bring both advanced ADAS and digital cockpit functions, in a very cost-effective manner, to entry and mid-level tiers,” Contreras said.

Advancements in Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon Drive and Snapdragon Cockpit Elite platforms will bring a “new generation of embodied, agentic AI into vehicles that will very soon come into commercialization,” Contreras said.

Partners galore

Qualcomm announced during CES that its partner Leapmotor will deploy the first mass-production vehicle powered by dual Snapdragon Elite (SA8797P) automotive platforms with the new flagship model D19, which is currently entering mass production.

The dual‑chipset architecture delivers enough compute performance to “streamline vehicle electronics, reduce system complexity, and enable more advanced AI capabilities across the entire vehicle,” the company said. The platform uses the Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU together in parallel, allowing it to run both a large AI model in the cockpit and a visual model for driver-assistance tasks.

“The reason [the Leapmotor announcement] is so meaningful is that we only provided samples of this platform to customers in January of ’25,” said Nakul Duggal, EVP and Group GM, Automotive, Industrial and Embedded IoT and Robotics for Qualcomm. “It's one of the most complex SOCs that we have built relative to the previous generation, on some aspects probably 10 times more complex – the AI, the camera pipeline, the safety infrastructure – and it is a truly flex platform, in the sense that it has enough horsepower that most automakers would want to run both infotainment and some form of driver assistance on the same platform. If you recall a couple of years ago, when we introduced the concept of Flex, there were a lot of questions around ‘can you run two completely independent domains on the same SOC?’ And so we have proven to the automotive ecosystem that not only can you do that, but you can do that at scale with a significant amount of complexity.”

Duggal said Qualcomm has a dozen additional automakers in talks to commercialize the 8797, and said the growth represents “a true transition towards our fifth generation of silicon and central compute coming together.”

Qualcomm will also expand its partnership with Volkswagen Group by supplying Snapdragon Digital Chassis as VW’s new primary tech provider for the launch of the Group’s zonal SDV architecture. The public will get its first taste of the SOCs being used for infotainment capabilities sometime in 2027. VW was convinced to sign a Letter of Intent with Qualcomm because it had already worked on Qualcomm systems with its partner Rivian.

Not to be left out, Hyundai Mobis signed a memorandum of understanding with Qualcomm at CES 2026 to co-develop SDV and ADAS technologies for vehicles in emerging markets. The two companies said the development engineers would use Hyundai Mobis’s expertise in system integration, sensor fusion, and perception with Qualcomm’s SoCs to provide better performance, efficiency and stability.

Top challenges

When asked what he considers the two main challenges facing Qualcomm in the coming years, Granger pointed immediately to AI and politics.

“AI is super fast-moving,” he said. “How that will play out over time is going to be something that will keep us on our toes. We feel pretty confident that we've got both the performance and also the flexibility to accommodate, as research and use cases and whatnot continue to come. But that's going to be a very fun and interesting challenge, if you will.

“The geopolitical situation is certainly very, very interesting, something that we keep track of very carefully. I'm sure there'll be challenges over the next many years as we work through that.”