Qualcomm Makes $2.4 Billion Semiconductor Move

We’ve been talking about a pick-up in investment banking activity, one that will benefit our positions in Morgan Stanley MS and Bank of America BAC.

On Monday morning, we see that trend continuing with the Portfolio’s Qualcomm QCOM picking up Alphawave IP Group for about $2.4 billion. With $13.8 billion in cash on hand exiting the March quarter, Qualcomm has ample funds to execute the transaction, which is expected to close during the March 2026 quarter.

While not a well-known company, Alphawave is a vertically-integrated chip firm that focuses on high-speed connectivity and compute silicon for digital infrastructure with low-power solutions. Alphawave counts tier-one customers across the data center (including hyperscalers and AI-centric data centers), compute, networking, AI, 5G, autonomous vehicles and storage end markets.

As we see it, that combination fits very well with Qualcomm’s historical footprint in smartphones and increasingly AI on PC and IoT devices. What we like about the transaction is it should help foster Qualcomm’s diversification efforts away from the smartphone into higher-growth semiconductor end markets. As you know, that is a key part of our thesis on QCOM shares. Also, like Qualcomm, Alphawave leans into its IP portfolio, which should mesh very well with Qualcomm’s higher-margin licensing business.

As we move into the seasonally stronger second half of the year, we continue to rate QCOM shares a One. The next known catalyst for the shares will be the May revenue reports from Taiwan Semiconductor TSM and Foxconn, which will also be catalysts for our shares of Nvidia NVDA, Marvell MRVL, Apple AAPL and Universal Display OLED.

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long MS, BAC, QCOM, NVDA, MRVL, AAPL and OLED.