Alex Chen

I am Alex (Wei) Chen 陈伟, a Director at Qualcomm. Before joining Qualcomm through its acquisition of Nexa AI, I founded Nexa and served as its Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist, with the goal of making generative AI more efficient and accessible on everyday hardware.

At Nexa, our team built the NexaSDK — an open-source toolkit for running AI models on edge devices that found a real home in the developer community. I was the main technical author behind much of this work, including the Octopus model series, OmniVLM, OmniAudio, and NexaQuant. Along the way, we worked closely with engineering teams at NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel, and deployed with enterprise partners like Geely, HP, Lenovo, and İşbank.

My interests sit at the intersection of AI systems, LLM/VLM inference, hardware-software co-design, and robotics. I’m especially drawn to the question of how we build intelligence that can act in the physical world. I hold a PhD from Stanford University (2024) and a Bachelor’s from Tongji University (2019).

This blog is where I think out loud about AI, robotics, and the systems behind them. If something sparks a question or a conversation, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.