Qualcomm's Tony Pialis on Dragonfly and the Data Movement Wall

Tony Pialis, executive vice president and general manager of data center at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., joins Allyson Klein at AI Infra Summit to explain why data movement has overtaken compute as the constraint on AI infrastructure, and how Qualcomm Dragonfly, the company's new data center brand, is built to solve it. He covers performance per dollar and performance per watt as the metrics operators care about most, the power demands created by agentic workloads, a full-stack approach spanning open software, compute, connectivity and High Bandwidth Compute memory, and how chiplets and modular IP support an annual cadence of innovation. He closes with a bold prediction that optics break out next year. 

Host: Allyson Klein, Founder and CEO, TechArena 

Guest: Tony Pialis, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. 

Chapters: 
00:00 Welcome and introductions 
00:26 Leading Qualcomm's data center division 
01:03 Lessons from Alphawave and three startups 
02:38 Qualcomm Dragonfly and performance per TCO 
03:33 Agentic token growth and power demand 
04:56 The data movement wall 
06:39 Optimizing the full stack 
08:20 What High Bandwidth Compute means for operators 
09:13 Growth targets and the multi-generation roadmap 
10:14 Chiplets and an annual innovation cadence 
11:35 Supply constraints and the fight for capacity 
12:29 Predictions for next year: the breakout year for optics 
13:06 Where to learn more