Alex Chen

Founder, CEO & Chief Scientist of Nexa AI (acquired by Qualcomm); Director, Qualcomm. Santa Clara, CA.

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Santa Clara, CA

alexchen4ai@gmail.com

I am Alex (Wei) Chen, 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 generative AI inference runtime that runs models across NPUs, GPUs, and CPUs and has been widely adopted by 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, generative AI 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).

Selected Work

NexaSDK

Runtime

A generative AI inference runtime that runs models on NPU, GPU, and CPU — 8,000+ GitHub stars and #1 on GitHub Trending.

Hyperlink

Application

A local AI agent that lives inside your computer — it searches across all your files, fully private. 2.1M views and 30K users in two months, featured by NVIDIA, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD.

Octopus

Model

The world's first AI agent model built to run directly on hardware — function calling across PCs, phones, wearables, automotive, and robots — part of a model line that trended top-3 on Hugging Face, featured by Google I/O and the Google DeepMind blog.

For industry recognition of this work — from silicon vendors, model labs, and platforms — see the recognition page.

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.

news

Mar 13, 2026 Joined Qualcomm as Director following the acquisition of Nexa AI.

latest posts

Sep 20, 2026 The AI Coding Paradox: When Faster Code Makes Projects Slower
May 11, 2026 Understanding Kernel Design from a Mathematical Perspective
Apr 13, 2026 Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with the Delta Rule

selected publications

  1. arXiv
    AutoNeural: Co-Designing Vision-Language Models for NPU Inference
    Wei Chen, Liangmin Wu, Yunhai Hu, and 8 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02924, 2025
    arXiv Bib HTML
  2. arXiv
    Octopus v2: On-device language model for super agent
    Wei Chen and Zhiyuan Li
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.01744, 2024
    arXiv Bib HTML

FAQ

Are Alex Chen and Wei Chen the same person?

Yes. My legal name is Wei Chen and I go by Alex. Academic publications and my Stanford PhD appear under “Wei Chen”; my industry work at Nexa AI and Qualcomm uses “Alex Chen”. Both refer to the same person.

What is Nexa AI and what happened to it?

Nexa AI is the company I founded in 2024 to make generative AI run efficiently on everyday hardware (NPU, GPU, CPU). It built the NexaSDK runtime and the NexaML engine, plus models such as Octopus, OmniVLM, OmniAudio, and NexaQuant. Nexa AI was acquired by Qualcomm in 2026, and I joined Qualcomm as a Director.

What is NexaSDK?

NexaSDK is an open-source inference runtime for LLMs, vision-language, and audio models that runs across NPUs, GPUs, and CPUs. It has 8,000+ GitHub stars, reached #1 on GitHub Trending, and has been featured by NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm.

What do you work on at Qualcomm?

I lead generative AI inference research and engineering on Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms — in particular the Hexagon NPU — covering hardware-aware quantization, operator fusion, memory scheduling, kernel tuning, and SDK development, with a cross-functional team spanning model research and runtime optimization.

How can I get in touch?

Email alexchen4ai@gmail.com. I welcome research collaborations, speaking invitations, and conversations about AI systems, generative AI inference, and robotics.