Starlink Mobile’s cell towers will run on Qualcomm silicon. SpaceX has selected Qualcomm’s Dragonwing cellular infrastructure platforms for the nationwide terrestrial 5G network it plans to build in the U.S., Qualcomm said Wednesday, with deployment set to begin in 2027 and tens of thousands of sites planned over the multiyear agreement.
The announcement pairs Qualcomm’s Dragonwing QRU100 and QDU100 platforms with its commercial-grade Layer 1 software. The QRU100 handles processing inside Massive MIMO radio units, and the QDU100 handles latency-sensitive Layer 1 work in the distributed unit. Starlink Mobile’s radios will use 64 transmit and 64 receive paths (64T64R), a design Qualcomm said is meant to improve coverage, capacity and spectral efficiency.
“We shouldn’t live in a time where phone calls are still dropping whether you’re at home or on-the-go,” Michael Nicolls, senior vice president of Starlink, said in the release. He said SpaceX would use Qualcomm’s platform “to accelerate our timeline to develop our base station end-to-end architecture.”
Satellites plus towers
Starlink framed the towers as one half of a combined system. Starlink Mobile is “building the first fully-integrated US nationwide satellite and terrestrial network that will keep people connected on their phones no matter where they are,” the company posted on X, adding that its 5G base stations will use Qualcomm chips “to accelerate deployment, starting in 2027.”
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon wrote on X that “together with @elonmusk and the @SpaceX team, we’re excited to build world-leading cellular infrastructure and a path to AI-native 6G.” Both companies describe the 5G build as a commercial step toward that 6G goal. “Together with SpaceX, we are building world-leading cellular infrastructure in the United States, advancing 5G today, with an opportunity to lay the foundation for AI-native 6G in the years ahead,” said Durga Malladi, EVP and GM of technology planning, edge solutions and data center at Qualcomm Technologies.
A line item in Qualcomm’s quarter
The company returned to the deal later Wednesday in its fiscal fourth-quarter results, calling it “a landmark agreement with SpaceX” in a post on X that reported non-GAAP revenue of $10.4 billion. That summary sits alongside Qualcomm’s forecast that non-handset QCT revenue will grow more than 60% year over year and make up more than half of QCT revenue in fiscal 2027.
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