The UK chip designer is entering physical silicon for the first time, marking a break from its decades-old licensing model
Arm Holdings PLC (NASDAQ:ARM), the UK-based semiconductor company best known for licensing chip designs to the world's biggest technology firms, has unveiled its first ever in-house processor, with Meta signing on as the debut customer.
The new chip, called the AGI CPU (central processing unit), is designed specifically for running artificial intelligence workloads in data centres.
The move represents a significant departure for Arm, which has spent more than 35 years collecting royalties on chip designs used by companies including Apple, Nvidia, Amazon and Google, rather than manufacturing its own silicon.
Seven further customers have committed to the chip, among them OpenAI and Cloudflare, the web infrastructure company.
The processor is built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) 3-nanometre production process and is optimised for energy efficiency, with Arm claiming double the performance-per-watt compared with conventional x86 chips made by Intel and AMD.
Up to 64 units can be packed into a single air-cooled rack, making it suited to power-constrained data centres.
Arm developed the chip over roughly 18 months at a purpose-built $71 million laboratory in Austin, Texas.