British semiconductor design corporation Arm is expected to release its first self-developed chip this year.
On the 13th, the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing sources, that Arm's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Rene Hass is expected to unveil its first in-house manufactured chip as early as this summer. Arm is said to have already secured Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms as the first customer for the new chip. Following this news, Arm's stock price rose by 6.06% to close at $164.83 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Arm is a leading semiconductor design corporation, with semiconductor corporations worldwide, such as Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and NVIDIA, utilizing Arm's technology. More than 90% of the chips produced globally, including application processors (AP) used in smartphones, are based on the Arm architecture. In this way, Arm has grown by licensing its chip design assets to other companies rather than manufacturing chips itself.
Arm's own chip development signifies a shift away from its existing business model of providing chip design licenses. It also carries a high possibility of being in direct competition with some major customers, including NVIDIA. Previously, NVIDIA attempted to acquire Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion in 2020, but was halted by regulatory authorities due to antitrust concerns regarding Arm's core role in the chip market.
Arm's first product is expected to be a central processing unit (CPU) for servers in large data centers rather than a graphics processing unit (GPU) used for artificial intelligence (AI) training and operation. FT analyzes that Arm's own chip launch is seen as a step in a larger plan to eventually transition to AI chip production. Masayoshi Son, the chairman of SoftBank, the major shareholder that acquired Arm in 2016, is focusing on making Arm a key business aiming to expand AI infrastructure, and the launch of its own chip is considered an important stage for entering the AI chip market.