Biography|Cristiano Amon — The Web Summit Keynote at MEO Arena

People who meet Cristiano Amon as the chief executive of Qualcomm tend to start the story in a San Diego boardroom.

On 12 November 2024 he stood in Lisbon instead, inside the MEO Arena at Rossio dos Olivais.

The occasion was Web Summit, the annual technology conference that has used this hall since 2016.

Amon gave a keynote that day on generative AI as a new way to talk to devices.

Qualcomm published a recap the same date. Portuguese newspapers covering the floor recorded the same appearance.

Official photographs taken backstage that morning show him in the building, credited to David Fitzgerald for Web Summit.

Amon was born in Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, around 1970.

He studied electrical engineering at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas from 1988 to 1992, then worked in wireless systems at NEC and Ericsson before joining Qualcomm as an engineer in 1995.

He became the company's chief executive on 30 June 2021.

The Lisbon hour was not a product launch on a factory floor.

It was a public stage in a hall built for Expo 98, in a city that is not his headquarters, talking to a trade-show crowd about chips that sit between a person and a screen.

The arena seated about twenty thousand when it opened.

It has carried several sponsor names. By February 2024 the MEO name had returned, which is the name on the 2024 conference captions.

The pin is the arena that hosted the keynote, not a private office and not the Qualcomm campus on Morehouse Drive.

Stand on Rossio dos Olivais and the Campinas lecture halls of the early 1990s look less distant: the same engineer, a larger room.

The photograph attached was taken in this building on this day.

Photo: David Fitzgerald / Web Summit via Sportsfile, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.