Qualcomm automotive at CES: Cloud-to-car agentic AI, whether you asked for it or not

CES 2026: Qualcomm wants to be the car’s compute backplane—and the software factory behind it.

January 12, 2026

David Harold

Qualcomm used CES 2026 to stitch together five main announcements into a single platform narrative: consolidate vehicle domains onto fewer computers, virtualize the workloads, and wrap the whole thing in an Android/Google Cloud development pipeline that promises faster iteration. Leapmotor provides mass production with a dual-Elite central computer unifying cockpit, ADAS, body control, and gateway. ZF and Hyundai Mobis extend the same thesis outward. Qualcomm and Google supply the glue: AAOS SDV scaling, vSoCs on Google Cloud, and a Treble-like approach to reduce Android fragmentation across multiple generations of cockpit silicon. VW taking up Qualcomm adds massive heft and is

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Qualcomm automotive at CES: Cloud-to-car agentic AI, whether you asked for it or not

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