Qualcomm is bored of your phone. That was the unspoken vibe at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi this week. The company that basically owns the modem inside your pocket spent its stage time trying to convince us it should also own the nervous system of every mechanical limb, wheel, and sensor-laden torso in the country.

It’s a pivot born of necessity. Smartphone cycles are stagnant, and everyone is tired of hearing about "thinness." So, Qualcomm brought out the heavy metal. Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) zipped across the stage with the practiced grace of a Roomba on steroids, while humanoids—the tech industry's favorite expensive obsession—stared blankly into the middle distance.

The messaging was slick. The reality was a bit more jittery.

Cristiano Amon’s team isn’t just selling chips anymore; they’re selling "the edge." In plain English, that means they want the robot to do its thinking locally so it doesn't have to wait for a round-trip ticket to a server farm in Bangalore just to avoid bumping into a pallet of mangoes. They showed off the new Robotics RB3 Gen 2 and RB5 platforms, claiming these slabs of silicon can handle the massive compute loads required for real-time spatial mapping.

Great. But let’s talk about the friction.

India is a market defined by scale and price sensitivity. Qualcomm is pitching high-end, NPU-heavy architecture to a sector where the primary competition isn't another robot—it’s the incredibly low cost of human labor. You can buy a fleet of AMRs to navigate a warehouse, but when the entry price for a fully integrated system hovers around $15,000 per unit before you even talk about the maintenance contracts, the math gets ugly. The "Impact" in the summit's title usually refers to economic growth, but for the warehouse worker in Noida, it mostly sounds like the thud of a pink slip.

The humanoids were the real circus act. Qualcomm showcased a few bipedal prototypes powered by their latest Hexagon processors. They can walk. They can pick up a box. They can even mimic human gestures with a lag that’s just long enough to be deeply unsettling. It’s a feat of engineering, sure. But it feels like a solution in search of a problem. We’re being told these machines will "augment" the workforce, a sanitized way of saying they’ll eventually do the boring stuff so humans can do... well, whatever is left.

There’s a technical tax here, too. These robots are power-hungry. The demo floor was a forest of charging cables and "do not touch" signs. Qualcomm’s pitch relies on the idea that 5G—and the upcoming 6G whispers—will provide the glue for these machines. But walk fifty feet outside the Bharat Mandapam convention center and try to load a high-res video. The gap between the "connected future" on the PowerPoint and the spotty signal on the street is wide enough to drive an autonomous truck through.

Then there’s the heat. Silicon hates the Indian summer. Pushing high-performance AI workloads at the edge creates a thermal nightmare. Qualcomm claims their new architecture is efficient, but physics is a cruel mistress. A humanoid that needs to sit in an air-conditioned room to keep its brain from melting isn't exactly the rugged industrial savior the marketing suggests.

The summit didn't spend much time talking about the e-waste, either. We’re already struggling to recycle the billions of smartphones Qualcomm helped put into the world. Now, we’re looking at a future of discarded robotic limbs and proprietary batteries that will sit in landfills long after the software support for the RB5 platform has been discontinued.

Qualcomm wants to be the foundation of a new mechanical middle class. They want their chips in the delivery bots dodging traffic in Mumbai and the automated sorters in Chennai. It’s a bold bet on a future where hardware is everything and human muscle is a legacy feature.

But as the lights dimmed on the final demo, one of the smaller AMRs got confused by a stray camera cable, spun in a circle for three seconds, and simply gave up. It sat there, blinking its expensive sensors at a crowd of investors who were busy checking their phones.

If this is the automated revolution, it’s going to need a lot more than a faster processor to survive a Tuesday in Delhi.

Will the "Impact" be felt in the economy, or just in the venture capital pitch decks?