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Arm, one of the world\u2019s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm CEO Rene Haas made his pitch for how the new Arm CPU could benefit the tech industry and why this is the right time for the company to step outside of its lane and go head-to-head with other chipmakers.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me be clear: We are now in a new business for ARM, and we are supplying CPUs,\u201d Haas said, holding up one of the company's new chips. Arm\u2019s primary reason for moving in this direction, Haas said, is demand from customers.. But as artificial intelligence proliferates throughout the economy and demand for computing resources skyrockets, Arm is also trying to capture a sliver of the growing AI CPU market.<\/p>\n
Arm\u2019s in-house chip efforts had long been rumored, but now the company is finally offering a clearer picture of what it\u2019s doing. The new chip is called the Arm AGI CPU, a nod to artificial general intelligence, an often-invoked but still hypothetical form of AI that could match human performance across domains. It\u2019s designed to be coupled with other chips in high-performance servers inside data centers and to handle agentic AI tasks. The chip is being fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the world\u2019s leading semiconductor foundry, and is being built using TSMC\u2019s 3nm process.<\/p>\n
At the chip reveal event, Arm executives emphasized the company\u2019s history of designing energy-efficient chips and claimed that its new AGI CPU will be the world\u2019s \u201cmost efficient agentic CPU on the market.\u201d Compared to competitors like the latest x86 chips made by Intel and AMD, Arm says this chip will deliver better performance per watt, or the amount of energy a computer uses to operate, and could save customers billions of dollars in electricity spending.<\/p>\n
The first major customer of Arm\u2019s new chip is Meta, which the company says has received samples of the CPU. OpenAI, SAP, Cerebras, and Cloudflare, as well as the Korean tech firms SK Telecom and Rebellions, have also agreed to buy the chip. Arm projects its AGI CPU will reach \u201cfull production availability\u201d in the second half of this year.<\/p>\n
Santosh Janardhan, Meta\u2019s head of infrastructure, appeared on stage and said he thought the Arm chip was going to \u201cexpand the [chip] industry on multiple axes.\u201d As Meta pushes toward \u201cpersonal superintelligence"\u2014AI that will make its apps deeply personalized\u2014Janardhan said the company needs more silicon, and is especially interested in power efficiency.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s vice president of science and former chief product officer, Kevin Weil, also showed up on stage alongside Haas. \u201cOne of the most common things I hear inside of OpenAI: \u2018I need more compute,\u2019\u201d Weil said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the coin of the realm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Amazon senior vice president and distinguished engineer James Hamilton, and Google AI infrastructure chief Amin Vahdat appeared in pretaped video testimonials praising Arm\u2019s new hardware. None committed to buying it, but all three tech giants already use Arm\u2019s designs in their own processors.<\/p>\n
Arm\u2019s history traces back to the late 1970s, when it was known as Acorn and produced microprocessors. In the 1990s the entity changed its name to ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) and its then-CEO began licensing the firm\u2019s chip designs to other companies. Arm, which has since dropped the all-caps \u201cARM\u201d branding, saw its business boom during the mobile revolution. By the 2010s many of the world\u2019s largest tech companies, including Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Tesla, were all relying on its technology.<\/p>\n
Arm appeared eager at the press event to demonstrate it has support from bold-faced names in the tech industry. While the company is mostly taking aim at chipmakers like AMD and Intel, which build CPUs based on a different architecture, it risks potentially alienating some of its longtime partners by releasing its own chip. Nvidia, which primarily makes GPUs, also bundles Arm-based CPUs into its rack systems. Earlier this year, Nvidia said it would sell stand-alone CPUs for the first time. Meta was one of its first buyers.<\/p>\n
Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at the research firm Creative Strategies, says that Arm could be perceived more as a competitor than partner as its strategy evolves. Right now, Arm is launching a streamlined CPU with a relatively small number of cores\u2014the chip\u2019s built-in processing units\u2014designed specifically for running AI agents, Bajarin points out. Over time, Arm may expand into more general-purpose CPUs, while AMD and Intel develop chips tailored for agentic AI. That would put the companies in more direct competition with one another.<\/p>\n
But at the moment, Bajarin says, Arm is simply trying to get in on the fast-growing market for data center CPUs. Creative Strategies forecasts that demand for such chips will grow from $25 billion this year to $60 billion globally by 2030. That figure represents only CPUs for traditional cloud computing data centers. When CPUs for agentic AI are factored in, Bajarin\u2019s demand estimate jumps closer to $100 billion by 2030. Even if Arm captures only a sliver of that, it could be a significant source of revenue for the company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Arm, one of the world\u2019s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48209,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}