Arm, which had supplied semiconductor design asset (IP) to global semiconductor corporations under the philosophy of "we do not compete with customers," unveiled its own artificial intelligence (AI) chip. With demand for AI chips capable of running AI models surging alongside the industry's growth, it appears to have broken its long‑held philosophy and jumped into the market. Arm said it plans to supply the newly designed AI chip to Meta first, followed by OpenAI and SK Telecom.
On the 24th (local time), Arm said at a media conference that it will launch the "Arm AGI CPU," a central processing unit (CPU) for AI data centers. Arm said the newly unveiled CPU posted more than double the performance compared with the "x86" platform chosen by CPU market leaders Intel and AMD. Built on TSMC's 3‑nanometer (nm; one‑billionth of a meter) process, the chip is designed to run up to 136 cores within 300 watts of power, focusing on maximizing energy efficiency for AI data centers that require large amounts of power.
Arm plans to target the CPU market based on the low‑power design expertise it has proven in the mobile market. Arm grew rapidly by supplying low‑power IP for mobile to Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics. As power consumption in AI data centers is soaring, the company aims to seize the market with designs that can maximize the power efficiency it has built in the IP market.
Rene Haas, Arm chief executive officer (CEO), said, "Today marks the next stage of the Arm compute platform and a defining moment for our company," adding, "We can now support AI infrastructure at global scale by giving partners more choices built on Arm's high performance and low power."
He said the importance of the CPU is growing in the AI era. "Attention on today's AI infrastructure has focused on the GPU. The CPU has received relatively less attention, but the CPU and GPU are complementary," he said. "With the advancement of AI and the emergence of agentic AI, the role of the CPU will not shrink but rather grow."
Rene Haas added, "Today, when a user enters a prompt on a PC or smartphone, accelerators (such as GPUs) generate the tokens, but the CPU handles the process of delivering the results back to the user."
Arm expects CPU demand to surge and plans to seize the market with a product that overcomes the limits of server CPUs. "Arm projects that up to 12 million CPUs will be needed per 1 GW data center," Haas said. "The AGI CPU was newly designed from the ground up to overcome the limitations facing server CPUs to date."
Arm's first customer is Meta. Meta participated in the joint development of the CPU and will deploy Arm's CPU in its data centers alongside Meta's AI chip. Arm said OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare are considering adoption, and in Korea, SK Telecom has been cited as a customer.
Arm also plans to strengthen cooperation with Korean corporations. Mohamed Awad, Arm senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud AI business, said at an Asia‑Pacific online media briefing on the 25th, "We have a partnership with Samsung Electronics primarily on the memory side," adding, "We are reviewing collaboration with Samsung Electronics for a successor model to the Arm AGI CPU."