Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite to Power Next Galaxy Watch

Qualcomm has announced its next wearable chipset, and it is coming to Samsung smartwatches. The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 could feature Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear Elite processor. All previous Galaxy Watch models featured Samsung’s in-house Exynos processors.

Snapdragon Wear Elite will power Samsung’s next Galaxy Watch

Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon Wear Elite at MWC 2026, which is now underway in Barcelona, Spain. And surprisingly, the company confirmed Samsung as one of the firms preparing watches with the new chip. It didn’t name any product, but the Wear Elite could power the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 coming in the second half of this year. It could also make it into the Galaxy Watch 9 series.

This is a major strategic move from Samsung. The company has traditionally relied on its in-house Exynos chips for Galaxy Watches. However, starting this year, we will see Snapdragon inside its wearables. It’s unclear if Samsung will go all-in with the Snapdragon Wear Elite for its next watches or opt for a dual-sourcing approach already used in Galaxy smartphones.

As far as specs are concerned, the Snapdragon Wear Elite is fabricated on a 3nm process and adopts a big.LITTLE architecture. It combines one high-performance CPU core with four power-efficient cores. Qualcomm says this design delivers up to five times faster single-core CPU performance compared to its previous-generation wearable chips, while GPU performance sees a 7X boost.

The Snapdragon Wear Elite features an integrated Hexagon NPU capable of running AI models with up to two billion parameters directly on the device. This enables advanced on-device processing for health tracking, life logging, digital assistants, voice transcription, and translation. It also includes a low-power eNPU for always-on activity recognition, wake-word detection, and noise suppression.

The chip supports GNSS (including GPS), NB-IoT for satellite communication, 5G RedCap, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 6.0, and ultra-wideband. Qualcomm claims up to 30% longer battery life thanks to the 3nm process and improved architecture. Fast charging is also supported, with 300mAh–600mAh batteries reaching 50% in just 10 minutes.

Samsung may launch the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 and Watch 9 series with this chip in July 2026 alongside the Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Fold 8.