• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Jim Cramer on Thursday that the so-called metaverse is much more than just the next frontier for social media.
• "You'll always have the enormous social network, consumer play," he continued, "but industrial is huge."

On Thursday, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told  Jim Cramer that the so-called metaverse is far more than just the next frontier for social networking.

"The metaverse is going to evolve as a variety of distinct opportunities," Amon said in an interview with "Mad Money" one day after the firm announced solid first-quarter results.

"There will always be the big social network, consumer play." "You'll have a big one for gaming, but industrial is huge," Amon countered. Qualcomm's cooperation with Microsoft, which uses Qualcomm's chips in its mixed reality smart glasses, he said, is critical.

The metaverse has gotten a lot of attention recently, thanks to social media behemoth Facebook changing its name to Meta Platforms and making a huge investment in creating interactive, immersive virtual worlds. The concept of the metaverse, which had been discussed in science-fiction circles for decades, was now firmly on Wall Street's radar.

Its promise, according to Amon, extends beyond recreational and social functions. The reason for this, he explained, is that cloud computing use is spreading across the enterprise landscape.

"We have digital twins of everything in the cloud economy we have right now, with everything connected to the cloud." "For example, you could have a digital twin of a car," Amon explained.

"When the automobile arrives at the dealership and someone looks under the hood, they can install a virtual reality, augmented reality device, and it will tell you from the digital twin in the cloud where to fix it, where the problem is," he said, adding that it could also be used for employee training.

Amon's words build a picture of the metaverse that resembles Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's vision. Huang told Cramer on "Mad Money" in November that he believes businesses are investing in the metaverse because it can be used to run simulations that result in real-world savings.

"By doing so, we'd be able to reduce waste, which is why the economics are so excellent for businesses," Huang explained. "They're willing to spend a tiny amount of money to acquire artificial intelligence capacity, but the money they save will hopefully amount to hundreds of billions of dollars."