At CES 2026, Qualcomm announced a series of high-profile partnerships with ZF, Google, and Leapmotor, reinforcing its position at the center of the rapidly evolving automotive technology ecosystem.
Together, these collaborations aim to accelerate the adoption of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), software-defined vehicles, and AI-powered driving experiences.
Qualcomm and ZF: Scalable ADAS for the Next Generation of Vehicles
Qualcomm and ZF revealed a joint effort to deliver a highly scalable ADAS solution that combines advanced AI compute with real-time perception capabilities. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride system-on-chips (SoCs), the platform is designed to support automated driving functions across a wide range of vehicle segments and automation levels.
At the core of the collaboration is ZF’s ProAI automotive supercomputer, which integrates Snapdragon Ride Pilot and Vision stacks to reduce development complexity and speed up time-to-market. ProAI brings together high-performance automotive computing and real-time perception, enabling automakers to deploy ADAS features ranging from regulatory safety functions to Level 3 automated driving.
With Snapdragon Ride onboard, the ZF ProAI platform can operate as a domain, zone, or centralized vehicle controller. It supports enhanced computer vision, sensor fusion, and decision-making control logic—either independently or combined into a single end-to-end (E2E) AI model. The result is a robust, open architecture that allows seamless integration of third-party software, giving automakers the flexibility to tailor systems to their specific needs.
Together, ZF and Qualcomm are delivering a new generation of vehicle intelligence built to meet the demands of software-defined vehicles, improve road safety, and accelerate the global rollout of automated driving technologies.
Qualcomm and Google Expand a Decade-Long Automotive Alliance
Qualcomm and Google also announced a significant expansion of their long-standing collaboration, which spans more than a decade in the automotive sector. The renewed partnership aims to transform vehicle technology by accelerating innovation, reducing time-to-market, and unlocking new capabilities driven by agentic AI.
The collaboration delivers end-to-end automotive solutions that integrate Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis platforms with Google’s automotive software. This combination enables automakers to build next-generation vehicles that can better anticipate, adapt to, and respond to driver needs through AI-driven intelligence.
Qualcomm and Google are jointly focused on delivering secure, scalable, AI-powered experiences for millions of vehicles worldwide. Their partnership began with Snapdragon-powered Android infotainment systems, helping drive adoption of Android Automotive OS (AAOS) and enabling the industry’s first vehicles with Google built-in.
The companies continue to deepen their collaboration through Google Cloud, simplifying deployment of advanced AI agents using Gemini Enterprise for automotive—an evolution of the Automotive AI Agent (AAA). Qualcomm has also introduced Project Treble for Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms, streamlining Android lifecycle management across four generations of platforms and more than 14 SoCs.
For automakers, this means dramatically simplified Android updates, lower engineering costs, and faster integration, supported by a 10-year plan for critical software updates. For drivers, it translates into smarter, safer, and more consistently updated vehicles throughout their lifespan.
Qualcomm and Leapmotor: A First-of-Its-Kind Cross-Domain Architecture
Qualcomm and Leapmotor introduced the world’s first cross-domain integrated solution powered by Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite automotive platforms. Unveiled at Qualcomm’s CES booth, the system demonstrates how a dual-chipset architecture can deliver exceptional compute performance while simplifying vehicle electronics.
The cross-domain controller showcases a scalable blueprint for centralized computing and fully software-defined vehicles. By reducing system complexity and enabling advanced AI workloads, the collaboration highlights the growing importance of deep integration between chipmakers and automakers at the vehicle architecture level.
Leapmotor’s upcoming flagship D19 will be the first production vehicle globally to feature this high-performance central controller based on dual SA8797P chipsets. Using two Snapdragon Elite automotive platforms, the controller unifies critical vehicle domains—including the intelligent cockpit, driver assistance, body controls, and vehicle gateway—into a single high-performance system.
The dual-chip design provides significant compute headroom for real-time coordination and advanced AI, including emerging agentic AI workloads. With the Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU working in parallel, the platform can simultaneously run a large multimodal AI model for the cockpit and a vision-language-action (VLA) model for driver assistance—delivering more intelligent, responsive, and future-ready driving experiences.
[source: Qualcomm]
