Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon on metaverse, industrial opportunity

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday that the chipmaker views the so-called metaverse as much more than just the next frontier for social media.

“The metaverse is going to develop as a number of different opportunities,” Amon said in an interview on “Mad Money,” appearing one day after the company’s posted strong first-quarter quarter results.

“You’re always going to have the big social network, consumer play. You’re going to have a big one for gaming, but industrial is big,” contended Amon. He said that underscores the importance of Qualcomm’s partnership with Microsoft, which uses Qualcomm’s chips in its mixed reality smart glasses.

Discussion of the metaverse has surged in recent months, thanks in large part to social media giant Facebook changing its name to Meta Platforms and announcing a major investments to build out interactive, immersive virtual worlds. That put the metaverse concept, which had been around in science-fiction circles for decades, firmly on Wall Street’s radar.

Amon stressed that its potential goes beyond recreational and social uses. The reason for that is because cloud computing adoption is stretching across the enterprise landscape, he said.

“With the cloud economy we have right now, with everything connected to the cloud, we have digital twins of everything. You can have a digital twin of a car, for example,” Amon said.

“When the car shows up at the dealership and somebody is going to look under the hood, they can put a virtual reality, augmented reality device, and it will tell you from the digital twin in the cloud, where to fix it, where’s the problem,” he said, adding that it can be used for worker training, too.

Amon’s comments paint a picture of the metaverse that looks similar to the vision of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. In a “Mad Money” interview in November, Huang told Cramer he believes companies are investing in the metaverse because it can be used to run simulations that translate into real-world savings.

“By doing that, we could decrease the amount of waste, and that’s the reason why the economics are so good for companies,” Huang said. “They’re willing to invest a small amount of money to buy into this artificial intelligence capability but what they save is hopefully hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.”

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