Arm, one of the world’s 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.
“Let me be clear: We are now in a new business for ARM, and we are supplying CPUs,” Haas said, holding up one of the company’s new chips. Arm’s 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.
Arm’s in-house chip efforts had long been rumored, 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 often-invoked but still hypothetical form of AI that could match human performance across domains. It’s 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’s leading semiconductor foundry, and is being built using TSMC’s 3nm process.
At the chip reveal event, Arm executives emphasized the company’s history of designing energy-efficient chips and claimed that its new AGI CPU will be the world’s “most efficient agentic CPU on the market.” 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.
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 the Korean tech firms SK Telecom and Rebellions, have also agreed to buy the chip. Arm projects its AGI CPU will 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 was going to “expand the [chip] industry on multiple axes.” As Meta pushes toward “personal superintelligence”—AI that will make its apps deeply personalized—Janardhan said the company needs more silicon, and is especially interested in power efficiency.
OpenAI’s vice president of science and former chief product officer, Kevin Weil, also showed up on stage alongside Haas. “One of the most common things I hear inside of OpenAI: ‘I need more compute,’” Weil said. “It’s kind of 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 pretaped video testimonials praising Arm’s new hardware. None committed to buying it, but all three tech giants already use Arm’s designs in their own processors.
Arm’s 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’s chip designs to other companies. Arm, which has since dropped the all-caps “ARM” branding, saw its business boom during the mobile revolution. By the 2010s many of the world’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Tesla, were all relying on its technology.
