Poor, one of The world’s leading chip design firms announced Tuesday that they will produce their own semiconductors. This move is a departure from the long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that produce and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm CEO Rene Haas discussed how the new Arm CPU could benefit the technology industry and why now is the right time for the company to step out of its path and compete with other chipmakers.
“Let me be clear: We are now in a new business for ARM, and we are shipping CPUs,” Haas said, holding up one of the company’s new chips. The main reason for Arm to move in this direction, Haas says, is customer demand. But as artificial intelligence spreads throughout the economy and demand for computing resources skyrockets, Arm is also trying to grab a piece of the growing AI CPU market.
Arm’s internal chip efforts have been rumored for some time, but now the company is finally offering a clearer picture of what it’s doing. The new chip is called the Arm AGI CPU, a nod to artificial general intelligence, an oft-touted but still hypothetical form of AI that could rival human performance in several domains. It is designed to be linked to other chips in high-performance servers in data centers and perform agentic AI tasks. The chip is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, and is built using TSMC’s 3nm process.
At the chip unveiling event, Arm executives highlighted the company’s history of designing low-power chips and claimed that the new AGI CPU will be the world’s “most efficient agentic CPU on the market.” Compared to competitors like the latest x86 chips from Intel and AMD, Arm says this chip will deliver better performance per watt, or the amount of energy a computer uses to run, and could save customers billions of dollars in electricity expenses.
The first major customer of Arm’s new chip is Meta, which the company says has received samples of the CPU. OpenAI, SAP, Cerebras and Cloudflare, as well as Korean technology companies SK Telecom and Rebellions, have also agreed to purchase the chip. Arm expects its AGI CPU to reach “full production availability” in the second half of this year.
Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure, appeared on stage and said he thought the Arm chip would “expand the (chip) industry on multiple axes.” While Meta is pushing for “personal superintelligence” – AI that will make its apps deeply personalized – Janardhan said the company needs more silicon and is particularly interested in energy efficiency.
OpenAI’s vice president of science and former chief product officer, Kevin Weil, also appeared on stage alongside Haas. “One of the most common things I hear within OpenAI: ‘I need more computing power,’” Weil said. “It’s a bit like the coin of the realm.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Amazon senior vice president and distinguished engineer James Hamilton, and Google AI infrastructure chief Amin Vahdat appeared in pre-recorded video testimonials praising Arm’s new hardware. No one has committed to buying it, but all three tech giants are already using Arm’s designs in their own processors.
Arm’s history dates 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 the then-CEO began licensing the company’s chip designs to other companies. Arm, which has since dropped the all-caps “ARM” branding, saw its business growth during the mobile revolution. In the 2010s, many of the world’s largest technology companies, including Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung and Tesla, all relied on their technology.
