Qualcomm Powers the Rise of Personal AI with New Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform

Qualcomm Powers the Rise of Personal AI with New Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform

Highlights:

• Snapdragon Wear^™ Elite platform powers Personal AI at the edge - enabling personalized interactions and insights across diverse form factors including watches, pins, pendants and much more.
• It features an industry-first NPU-powered wearable platform, enabling high-performance AI processing directly on the device.
• Snapdragon Wear Elite is supported by a wide range of partners, including Google, Motorola and Samsung.

Qualcomm Technologies Inc. today announced the Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform, a personal AI platform designed to unlock the next generation of truly personal, always-on, intelligent wearable computing devices. Personal AI devices will be a critical layer of the intelligent network for the AI era and Snapdragon Wear Elite is the world's first Personal AI wearable platform that works across WearOS by Google^™, Android, and Linux with a NPU for on-device AI and advanced suite of ultra-low power connectivity solutions.

"Snapdragon is transforming personal computing by enabling a new category of Personal AI devices. Spanning a broad range of form factors, these devices are no longer simply extensions of the smartphone, but active participants in a distributed AI network across mobile, compute, XR, wearables, and more," said Alex Katouzian, Executive Vice President and Group General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "Snapdragon Wear Elite delivers powerful edge AI with an integrated NPU architecture and advanced sensor processing, enabling true, Personal AI experiences. This is our next step toward our vision of the "Ecosystem of You", where intelligence seamlessly travels with the user, learning and adapting to their context across their personal devices.

Snapdragon Wear Elite in the Ecosystem of You
Personal AI reaches its full potential when your devices work as one-an "Ecosystem of You"-where intelligent, multimodal AI agents move with you, understand your context, and anticipate your needs across every device.

Snapdragon Wear Elite delivers key on-device capabilities that support rich, real-time agentic experiences. By integrating the Qualcomm^® Hexagon^™ NPU to support up to billion-parameter models at the edge, and pairing it with advanced sensor fusion, high-performance, low-power connectivity and computing, Snapdragon Wear Elite enables a new class of Personal AI experiences, including context-aware recommendations, natural voice interactions, life logging, and AI agents that can take actions and orchestrate tasks on users' behalf.

Unrivaled speed and efficiency for longer experiences
Snapdragon Wear Elite delivers a massive leap in power efficiency with unrivaled speed and fluidity¹. Backed by 5x improvement on single-core CPU performance and up to 7x faster GPU¹, for app launching, multitasking, and smoother rendering.

Additionally, the platform supports multi-day battery life, reducing charging sessions, while advanced power management enables 30% longer day of use compared to the previous generation. When recharging is needed, rapid charging powers a device up to 50% in approximately 10 minutes.

The new Snapdragon Wear platform introduces a first-of-its-kind multi-mode connectivity architecture integrating six advanced technologies: 5G RedCap, Micro-Power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 6.0, UWB, GNSS, and NB-NTN.

• 5G RedCap delivers advanced, low-power cellular connectivity for always connected intelligent experiences.
• Micro-Power Wi-Fi enables always-on Wi-Fi connectivity at significantly low power for intelligent wearables that require continuous AI context syncing, richer data exchange, and seamless coordination with nearby devices and cloud services.
• Bluetooth^® 6.0 enables proximity-aware interactions to help devices more precisely find, connect, and work together across a broad ecosystem of personal devices.
• UWB enables secure, precise proximity-based interactions, including device finding and interactions with high-value assets including cars, homes, and enterprise environments.
• Our GNSS solution enables more advanced AI processing for precise location context that helps AI experiences better understand where users are and adapt interactions accordingly.
• NB-NTN extends connectivity beyond terrestrial networks, enabling satellite-based two-way messaging and critical communications from intelligent wearables when cellular and Wi-Fi coverage is unavailable, in collaboration with ecosystem partners including Skylo.

A Comprehensive Ecosystem
Leading global partners are supporting the platform including Google, Motorola and Samsung.

"With Wear OS, we are reimagining the smartwatch experience and moving from an operating system to an always with you intelligent system that understands and works for you," said Bjørn Kilburn, GM of Wear OS by Google. "The Snapdragon Wear Elite platform opens new possibilities, delivering the performance, battery life and connectivity essential for the next generation of Wear OS."

"With our AI perceptive companion concept, or 'Project Maxwell' that we showcased at CES, we are exploring the limits of what's possible in personal intelligence," said Francois LaFlamme, Vice President and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Motorola. "The shift toward Personal AI depends on a foundation that can balance on-device intelligence, sensing, connectivity, and more efficient compute, so these devices can move with you, learn from you, and support more intuitive interactions throughout the day. The Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform gives us the opportunity to fully explore the potential of concepts like Maxwell and to push even further beyond what we have demonstrated so far."

"Samsung and Qualcomm Technologies share a long history of advancing what's possible in mobile computing, and we are thrilled to extend this partnership into the wearable category," said InKang Song, Executive Vice President and Head of Technology Strategy Team, MX Business at Samsung Electronics. "By integrating the new Snapdragon Wear Elite platform, the next-generation Galaxy Watch will be an even more holistic wellness companion. This marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to deliver more efficient and personalized experiences, right from your wrist."

The first commercial devices powered by Snapdragon Wear Elite are expected to be available in the next few months.

For more details, please visit the Snapdragon Wear Elite webpage and product brief. Attendees of MWC Barcelona can also visit Qualcomm Booth 3E10 located in Hall 3 at Fira Gran Via to see demonstrations and speak with Qualcomm representatives.

About Qualcomm
Qualcomm relentlessly innovates to deliver intelligent computing everywhere, helping the world tackle some of its most important challenges. Building on our 40 years of technology leadership in creating era-defining breakthroughs, we deliver a broad portfolio of solutions built with our leading-edge AI, high-performance, low-power computing, and unrivaled connectivity. Our Snapdragon^® platforms power extraordinary consumer experiences, and our Qualcomm Dragonwing™ products empower businesses and industries to scale to new heights. Together with our ecosystem partners, we enable next-generation digital transformation to enrich lives, improve businesses, and advance societies. At Qualcomm, we are engineering human progress.

Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering and research and development functions and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business. Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. Qualcomm patents are licensed by Qualcomm Incorporated.