Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Intel veteran who was most recently senior fellow and chief architect for the Xeon server CPUs, says he has joined Qualcomm as the chip designer builds out a team to enter the data center CPU market.

A chief architect for Intel’s Xeon server processors said he has joined Qualcomm as the rival chip designer builds out a team to enter the data center CPU market.

Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Intel veteran who was most recently a senior fellow and chief architect for the company’s Xeon processors, said on LinkedIn Monday that he joined Qualcomm as a senior vice president this month after leaving Intel.

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“The opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers was immensely compelling to me—a once-in-a-career opportunity that I could not pass on,” Kottapalli (pictured) wrote on LinkedIn.

Kottapalli—who previously served as lead engineer for several Itanium and Xeon chips at Intel before becoming chief Xeon architect at the company—provided the update a little more than a month after Qualcomm disclosed that its data center team is developing a “high-performance, energy-efficient server solution for data center applications.”

The chip designer made the disclosure in a December job listing for a server system-on-chip (SoC) security architect. The listing said the data center team is focused on building “reference platforms” based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon system-on-chips.

The server SoC security architect will lead the development of a “system architecture for confidential computing in data center products,” according to the listing. Confidential computing has become a standard feature in Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC CPUs over the last few years.

Qualcomm did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

This wouldn’t be Qualcomm’s only effort to sell products in the data center market. Over the past few years, the company has been selling AI accelerator chips under the Qualcomm Cloud AI brand. These chips have been supported by major IT companies such as Amazon Web Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo.

Qualcomm’s Revitalized CPU Push Started With PCs

Known best for its Arm-based Snapdragon processors for smartphones, San Diego, Calif.-based Qualcomm last year launched a renewed effort to compete with Intel and AMD in the PC CPU market with its Snapdragon X series of chips.

The company has been building out a global partner program and organization to enable and incentivize channel partners to sell Snapdragon X-based PCs, CRN has reported.

The Snapdragon X series is the first product lineup to use the company’s new custom, Arm-based CPU cores, which are based on technology Qualcomm gained from its $1.4 billion acquisition of chip design startup Nuvia in 2021.

When Qualcomm announced the Nuvia acquisition, the company said it would use the CPU cores for several product areas, including laptops, smartphones, digital cockpits, advanced driver assistance systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions.

However, the company confirmed in a legal filing last year that it also planned to continue developing CPUs for the data center market, as Nuvia originally intended.

The legal filing was a complaint against Arm, the British chip design licensor that sued Qualcomm and Nuvia in 2023 for allegedly breaching its licensing terms by continuing development of Nuvia’s CPU cores under Qualcomm after the acquisition closed.

The lawsuit ended in a mistrial in late December because a federal U.S. jury sided with Qualcomm on two key issues but deadlocked on a third. Arm, which sought the halting of sales and destruction of products based on the Nuvia CPU cores, plans to seek a retrial.

Qualcomm previously attempted to enter the server CPU market several years ago, but it stepped back from those efforts in 2018, which resulted in layoffs.

The Qualcomm job listing was first reported by Tom’s Hardware.