Qualcomm AI Innovators Program 2026/2027

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship funds and mentors graduate students pursuing technical research aligned with Qualcomm's core innovation areas, and artificial intelligence has become the program's dominant theme — recent North American winning proposals include work on democratizing chip design with on-device small language models as assistants and agents, building helpful embodied AI agents with long-horizon understanding, training a generally curious personal agent that learns what to remember and what to ask, physically grounded world modeling through controllable visual generative models, and state-space world models for intelligent radio access networks. Each fellowship carries $40,000 for a one-year term plus mentorship from a Qualcomm engineer, and the program runs parallel competitions in five regions: North America, Europe, India, South Korea, and East Asia. Qualcomm receives more than 380 proposals annually and funds 45 or more fellows; the selection process moves from written proposal review by Qualcomm R&D engineers to a finalist presentation before executive judges. Deadlines, eligible institution lists, and team-size rules differ by region, so applicants should work from the region-specific program page.