Qualcomm sees a chance to build vehicle-safety tech into new Indian highways, using roadside infrastructure like streetlights to cut crashes.

The chipmaker is talking about vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, tech that lets cars talk to other vehicles, to road infrastructure and even to pedestrians’ smartphones.

Nakul Duggal, who heads Qualcomm’s automotive, industrial and embedded IoT business, said fitting new highways for V2X doesn’t cost much because the same connectivity already going into new cars for over-the-air software updates can run through streetlights and other roadside gear too.

For years, Qualcomm has been working on this. Its pitch is that non-line-of-sight safety systems do a better job than cameras or radar alone.

The company is building three versions of the tech: vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-smartphone.

That last one is meant to warn drivers about pedestrians and cyclists near intersections, which Duggal flagged as a major crash zone alongside high-speed blind spots.

There’s a regulatory hurdle still to clear. V2X runs on the 5.9 GHz spectrum band, and it isn’t settled yet whether that band should stay open for wide use or get licensed out to telecom operators.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India recently put out a consultation paper aimed at setting rules before deployments scale up, so different cities and vehicle systems don’t end up running on incompatible standards.

Duggal said how fast the rollout happens will hinge on how that spectrum question gets settled.

This automotive push is part of a broader shift for Qualcomm, which is trying to lean less on smartphones and more on cars, industrial IoT and physical AI.

Duggal pushed back on the idea that Qualcomm is losing ground in handsets, pointing instead to rising memory costs squeezing the business, particularly at the mid-range and entry-level end where memory eats up a bigger share of the bill.

He also pointed to agentic AI, where people talk to a device instead of tapping through apps, as a trend that is growing both the smartphone market and the amount of silicon packed into each device.

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