Qualcomm layoffs India: job cuts begin in Bengaluru, senior engineers hit

Qualcomm has started the job cuts that its chief executive, Cristiano Amon, told staff about in October, and its offices in India are among the first places affected. An exclusive report published on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, said employees in India and in California are being hit, and that some Indian staff have already received layoff notices, according to people familiar with the plans. A regional report said the Bengaluru office was hit first and that senior engineers with several years of experience are among those let go. Qualcomm declined to comment on the cuts.

Qualcomm is one of the largest chip design employers in India. Its Indian teams work on the processors, modems and software that go into Android phones, cars, laptops and connected devices. For engineers in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, the company has long been seen as a stable employer in semiconductor design, a field the Indian government is trying to grow. A cut that reaches senior engineers, not only new hires, is a signal that experience alone is no longer a shield in this part of the industry.

The reason given matters too. Amon's memo framed the exercise around building a "stronger performance culture" after annual reviews, rather than closing a product line. In practice this means cuts are spread across teams based on individual ratings and changing business priorities. People who work on smartphone chips may be more exposed, since that is the business under pressure. In its results for the quarter to September, Qualcomm said handset revenue fell 26% and its main chip division, QCT, earned about $9.0 billion, down 8%. The company linked the phone slowdown to industry-wide memory price pressures in the global smartphone market. At the same time, automotive revenue rose 89% to about $1.99 billion, and the company said it is targeting about $5 billion of data centre revenue in fiscal 2027.

That split shows where the company is moving: away from depending on phones and towards cars, PCs, connected devices and data centres, which are the large computer facilities that run cloud services and AI models. Skills in those areas, such as automotive software, power-efficient chip design for servers and AI inference (running trained AI models to give answers), are where the company says it is growing.

Peepals calculation: If the earlier estimate of about 1,000 India job losses held, it would equal about 5% of an India workforce of about 20,000 (1,000 ÷ 20,000 = 0.05). Handset chips brought in about $5.1 billion of the quarter's roughly $10.4 billion in revenue, or about 49% (5.1 ÷ 10.4 ≈ 0.49), so the business under the most pressure is still close to half of Qualcomm's sales. Our calculation from the reported figures.

Short-term: Employees at Qualcomm's Indian sites face uncertainty over the next few weeks as notices go out. Recruiters in Bengaluru and Hyderabad may see more experienced chip and embedded-software engineers on the market at once, which can make job hunting slower for mid-career candidates in the same skills.

Long-term: The move fits a wider pattern in technology companies of trimming older product teams while hiring for AI, data centre and automotive work. For India's semiconductor talent pool, the demand is likely to shift towards those newer areas rather than disappear.

Who is affected: Qualcomm staff in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi NCR and Chennai, especially in teams tied to smartphone chips; engineering students and job seekers aiming for chip design roles; and other semiconductor firms that may find experienced hires more easily.

What to watch next: The WARN filings in California, which the exclusive report said are expected in the coming days, should show how many US workers are affected; Qualcomm has not said whether it will give a number for India.

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