Samsung has been using flagship Snapdragon chips in many high-end phones over the past years. And this year, it will also use a Qualcomm processor for its wearables. Goodbye, Exynos! Qualcomm announces new chip for wearables
At MWC 2026 in Barcelona, Qualcomm announced its latest chip for wearable devices. The Snapdragon Wear Elite is an advanced 3nm chipset built specifically for on-device AI. It aims to bring a next-gen solution for an agentic AI experience that’s always available. According to Qualcomm, the new chipset will work across Android, Wear OS, and Linux. While some brands — Samsung including — will use this advanced SoC in their next wearables, the Wear Elite will be included in all sorts of tech, including XR and compute.
Snapdragon Wear Elite delivers powerful edge AI with an integrated NPU architecture and advanced sensor processing, enabling true, Personal AI experiences. This is our next step toward our vision of the “Ecosystem of You”, where intelligence seamlessly travels with the user, learning and adapting to their context across their personal devices.
Alex Katouzian, Executive Vice President and Group General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
According to the press release, Snapdragon Wear Elite will be included in future Samsung, Google, and Motorola wearables, among others.
A new standard for power (and AI) on your wrist
The Snapdragon Wear Elite SoC promises significant upgrades over Qualcomm’s previous Snapdragon W5+ Gen 2, used in the Google Pixel Watch 4.
The processor will deliver 5x faster single-core CPU performance, as well as up to seven times faster GPU. With this massive improvement, the Wear Elite will be able to run a 2 billion AI parameter model on-device, allowing real-time context for a truly personal experience with zero latency.
Everything you need to know about the Snapdragon Wear Elite | Image by Qualcomm
Beyond the enhanced agentic AI capabilities, the chipset promises significantly better battery life. Qualcomm claims that the advanced SoC will make the battery last up to 30% longer. Moreover, charging time has been drastically reduced, with the Wear Elite delivering up to 50% power in about 10 minutes.
By the looks of it, future smartwatches are getting quite the boost in the areas that matter most: battery life, performance, and truly useful AI assistance.
A major shift in smartwatches could be coming
Samsung has included Galaxy AI features on its latest wearables, giving users personalized insights for better sleep, activity, and more. Is a new standard coming now that the South Korean tech giant is choosing Snapdragon instead of Exynos for the upcoming Galaxy Watches?
Definitely. Most Galaxy AI features on Samsung wearables have been mostly passive, meaning the timepiece analyzes your data and tells you what happened. With the Galaxy Watch 8, Samsung included an active component in the AI experience, but the “brains” remained in the smartphone.
Snapdragon Wear Elite marks a new standard in wearable technology. | Video by Qualcomm
By utilizing Snapdragon Wear Elite SoC, future Galaxy watches will have an agentic AI brain of their own. That should open up a whole new set of possibilities.
The next Galaxy Watch options might handle all sorts of complex requests on-device without delay time, marking a clear shift from basic metrics analysis to a truly personal AI experience that lives entirely on your wrist.
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