SINGAPORE -- Qualcomm is pleased so far with the sales of Snapdragon-powered computers globally, an official said amid earlier reports that the new ARM-based laptops were not selling as well as expected.

"While we're still in the early phase of the transition to Copilot+ PCs, according to Circana in December, Snapdragon X Series had more than 10 percent share of the greater than $800 Windows laptops in US retail," said ST Liew, president of Qualcomm’s business in Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

Various tech publications last year noted that while Snapdragon laptops received lots of praise from reviewers because of their power efficiency, total sales reached under 720,000 units or less than 0.8 percent in the third quarter of 2024.

The company maintained that new laptops powered by the Snapdragon platform, which also touts tight integration with AI features, will help businesses increase productivity and reduce power costs.

At an event for tech journalists and influencers from Southeast Asia in Singapore, Liew said he sees all kinds of businesses benefitting from laptops powered by the Snapdragon X series of chips.

"First of all, you know you don't have to charge the things so often, and then you cut down electricity for starters," he said.

"And (artificial intelligence) brings a lot of productivity improvement--writing minutes, publishing it and tracking it for you and so forth. So those are productivity improvements that will touch on every little, every single business," he added.

Nitin Kumar, Qualcomm Technologies senior director for product management, said their products will help both businesses and consumers alike.

"Whether it's the consumer vertical or the commercial vertical, the innovation that we are providing is going to fundamentally change every user that [uses] the laptop," he said.

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Kumar said users can run large language models locally on Snapdragon X-powered laptops, even while in airplane mode.

"You can get your homework done if you're a student. If you're a writer, you can get your essays done. If you're a researcher, you can get your research done on that laptop."

"If you're looking for a family vacation, you can print travel itineraries on that laptop," he said.

Asked if Qualcomm plans to make AI-specific chips to challenge Nvidia, Liew said, "Well, we already have our (neural processing unit) in our (system-on-chip), like today, the Snapdragon X platforms have MPU on the chip itself. So we are confident of this architecture. And in fact, it's not new."

"We have been on AI, well, I think it's 13 to 15 years already. For the longest time, we have accumulated so much experience and a lot of engineering breakthroughs and innovations that are already inside our chip. And it has been inside our smartphones for the longest time.

"So all these accumulated innovations are now making their way into PC, is in the PC today," he said.

In March last year, Nvidia launched its latest family of chips for powering artificial intelligence. It became the world's highest valued company in the world in November, as the artificial intelligence boom continued to excite Wall Street.