In summary:
- Tech Advisor reports that Samsung will abandon its own silicon for the next Galaxy Watch, adopting Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear Elite chip instead.
- This switch promises significant improvements with 5x better performance, 7x faster GPU, and advanced on-device AI capabilities through the chip’s Hexagon NPU.
- The 3nm Snapdragon Wear Elite chip will enable Samsung’s smartwatch to function as a more sophisticated wellness companion with enhanced AI features.
The next Samsung Galaxy Watch will ditch the company’s own silicon and switch to Qualcomm’s new off-the-shelf Snapdragon Wear Elite chip.
Qualcomm just announced its new Snapdragon Wear Elite chip at MWC 2026 in Barcelona, promising a significant increase in performance for smartwatches and other wearables.
Perhaps the most interesting guest speaker at Qualcomm’s event, however, was Samsung executive InKang Song. Taking to the stage, the Executive Vice President and Head of the Technology Strategy Team at MX Business (my, that’s a long title) announced that Samsung’s next generation of wearable would run on the American company’s new chip.
However, it’s unclear whether this will be the Galaxy Watch 9 series, Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, or both, which wouldn’t be surprising. It could also be a new line of smartwatches, but that seems unlikely this far down the line.
The executive claimed that this additional power would enable the next-gen wearable to be an “even more holistic wellness companion”.
Qualcomm
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite joins the Exynos W1000 of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 in using the more efficient 3nm production process. It too boasts a single performance core and four efficiency cores, producing a 5x increase in performance and a 7x faster GPU compared to the Snapdragon W5+ Gen 2.
Arguably an even bigger advance here, however, appears to be the Snapdragon Wear Elite’s Hexagon NPU, which will enable the use of on-device AI models for “real‑time agentic experiences”. Think context‑aware recommendations, natural voice interactions, life logging and the like.
Given that Samsung has been so fond of focusing on AI advances over new hardware innovations in recent years – the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Privacy Screen notwithstanding – this switch to a more AI-ready wearable chip seems like a natural move.
Qualcomm expects that the first wearables powered by its Snapdragon Wear Elite will hit the market “in the next few months”. Given that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 series hit the market in July of last year, it’s possible that the Galaxy Watch 9 and Ultra 2 will be among this first batch.
The Watch 8 series and Ultra (2025 model) were launched in July 2025.
Author: Jon Mundy, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Jon is a freelance journalist who got his start covering mobile games at the dawn of the App Store. He has since covered everything from smart home tech and laptops to food and culture, but always seems to return to his fascination with smartphones.