Recently, Qualcomm announced plans to abandon the development of data center server chips. Qualcomm's CEO Steve Mollenkopf said in a financial teleconference last month that Qualcomm’s focus was on compressing non-core product spending. Insiders revealed that Qualcomm is still considering two options - close the business or sell the business.

In November of 2017, Qualcomm entered the server chip market formally. At that time, Qualcomm’s purpose was to break the dominance of Intel in this lucrative market, and the company has started to sell a new server processor that is better than Intel's. And has received support from Google and other large industry server chip buyers. For this business, Qualcomm originally wanted to use the ARM architecture to develop processors for servers. The server processes data in the enterprise network and acts as the backbone of the Internet. In terms of market size, servers are much smaller than phones and personal computers. But the price that chip makers can charge for the high performance parts they need to run makes the market attractive.

ARM is Intel's only competitor in the field of semiconductor design. Its architecture is mainly used for low-power products such as smart phones. In the process of helping the ARM architecture advance into the top-end computing market, Qualcomm is the biggest supporter. The price of such chips is as high as several thousand dollars. For many years, many chip makers have been hoping to provide processors for large data center operators such as Google and Amazon to break Intel’s dominance—about 99% of market share Intel occupied in this field.

Qualcomm began selling Centriq 2400 server chips last year. The company said at the time that the Samsung foundry chip outperformed the Intel Platinum Xeon 8180 processor in terms of power consumption and cost. When the chip was released in November last year, Microsoft also took the stage to express interest in this chip. But after this, Qualcomm has been silent on progress.