Cisco vs Qualcomm

Cisco — Hardware · Public · $433.3B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  Qualcomm — Hardware · Public · $174.9B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced

Relationship

Cisco AI PODs and Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra both serve buyers who need to buy data-centre AI compute; same layer and the same scale band (large-cap).

Assembled from the recorded fields for this pair, not hand-checked. The comparison below is read from each company’s own profile.

4 of 17 capabilitiesShared product typeSame scale band

4 of 17 capabilities — Shares AI compute hardware, accelerator silicon, evaluation and observability and 1 more.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship hardware.

Ludbee product records

Same scale band — Both large-cap.

Ludbee scale bands · from valuation and funding figures

Aligned comparison

FieldCiscoQualcomm
Market cap$433.3B$174.9B Qualcomm has 2.5× smaller
Employees86,20052,000 Qualcomm has 40% fewer
Founded19841985 1 yrs later
StatusPublicPublic match
CategoryHardwareHardware match
Stack layerAI agent, Application, HardwareDeveloper tool, Hardware, Platform
HeadquartersSan Jose, USASan Diego, USA

Capability overlap

Shared · 4

Accelerator siliconAI compute hardwareEvaluation and observabilityModel inference

Not verified for Qualcomm · 13

Agent orchestrationCustomer supportData analysisData securityGuardrails and safetyInterconnectModel trainingServer systemsSpeech to textSummarizationThreat detection and responseVoice agentWorkflow automation

Recorded for Cisco. Qualcomm’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for Cisco · 2

Model hostingKnowledge retrieval

Recorded for Qualcomm. Cisco’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Algorithmic pairing — assembled from recorded fields, not hand-checked

Cisco

Hardware

Cisco AI PODsHardware

Pre-validated modular AI infrastructure bundles that combine Cisco UCS servers, NVIDIA GPUs, Nexus 9000 400G/800G switching and management software into single orderable stacks for AI inferencing, training and fine-tuning.

Cisco AI PODs for CollaborationHardware

Turnkey on-premises AI appliance that runs real-time speech transcription for Cisco collaboration deployments locally, for customers with data-sovereignty requirements that rule out cloud AI services.

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AIHardware

Cloud-managed full-stack AI cluster sold as hardware plus software plus service, packaging Cisco 6000 and N9300 series switches on an 800GbE back-end fabric, UCS servers with NVIDIA H200 GPUs and BlueField DPUs, optional VAST storage and NVIDIA AI Enterprise under the Hyperfabric cloud controller.

Cisco Silicon OneHardware

Unified programmable networking-silicon architecture for AI, hyperscale, data-centre, service-provider and enterprise routing/switching, spanning five series (G/P/E/K/A) of chip families.

Qualcomm

Hardware

Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 UltraHardware

A PCIe AI inference accelerator card with up to 870 TOPS INT8 and 128GB of memory, built for generative AI and LLM inference in the data centre.

Qualcomm Dragonfly AI200Hardware

Rack-scale data-centre inference accelerator carrying 768 GB of LPDDR per card, announced October 2025 with commercial availability expected in 2026.

Qualcomm Dragonfly AI250Hardware

A second-generation rack-scale AI inference platform using Qualcomm High Bandwidth Compute (HBC) Gen 1 for memory-bound agentic inference.

Qualcomm Dragonfly AI300Hardware

A third-generation rack-scale AI inference platform using Qualcomm High Bandwidth Compute (HBC) Gen 2 for hyperscale LLM and agentic deployments.

Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ-2390Hardware

Embedded edge-AI processor in early access; part of Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ2 series for IoT.

Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ9 SeriesHardware

Embedded IoT/edge-AI processor family, distinct from the Dragonfly AI200/250/300 data-centre accelerator line; an IQ-9075 Evaluation Kit is purchasable through Qualcomm's developer hardware section.

SnapdragonHardware

Mobile and PC processor family whose on-device AI engine runs models locally on phones, laptops and cars.

Snapdragon X SeriesHardware

A family of Snapdragon compute platforms for Windows PCs (X, X2 Elite, X2 Plus) sold on NPU-accelerated on-device AI performance.

No counterpart

Cisco sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Qualcomm yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Application

AI Assistant for Webex Contact CenterApplication

AI assistant for contact-centre agents and supervisors that produces call and transfer summaries, live transcription, suggested chat replies, topic analytics, automatic CSAT scoring and agent burnout signals.

Cisco AI CanvasApplication

AgenticOps workspace where teams and AI agents collaborate to investigate, correlate and resolve issues across domains: natural-language querying, multi-step agent workflows, shared real-time visibility, and native Cisco plus third-party tool integration via Cloud Control Studio.

Cisco AI DefenseApplication

End-to-end AI security product that discovers an organisation's AI assets, red-teams models and applications for vulnerabilities, and enforces runtime guardrails against prompt injection and data leakage.

Cisco IQApplication

Agentic support intelligence delivered inside Cisco Support and Professional Services — 'the delivery vehicle for everything Cisco Support and Professional Services knows about your environment, made continuously available before you ask for it' — generally available as SaaS since April 2026 and included with existing support contracts.

Webex AI Workforce Engagement ManagementApplication

AI-native workforce engagement suite for contact centres that forecasts demand and optimises shifts, uses NLP and LLMs to evaluate 100 percent of human and AI agent interactions (AI Quality Management), and runs performance coaching and AI-led onboarding simulations.

AI agent

Webex AI AgentAI agent

Autonomous customer-service AI agent that handles inquiries conversationally across voice, SMS, email, chat and messaging apps and escalates to a human agent with context when it cannot resolve.

Qualcomm sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Cisco yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Developer tool

Qualcomm AI HubDeveloper tool

A developer platform for optimising, benchmarking and deploying on-device AI models against 300+ pre-optimised models and 50+ real Qualcomm devices in the cloud.

Platform

Qualcomm AI Inference SuitePlatform

A cloud and on-premises inference platform offering an SDK, OpenAI-compatible APIs and ready-made chat, RAG, image and code applications on top of Qualcomm's AI accelerators.