Famed semiconductor and software company Arm Holdings is starting to make its own chips after nearly 36 years of licensing its designs to the likes of Nvidia and Apple.
At an event Tuesday in San Francisco, the company revealed it Arm AGI CPUa production-ready chip built to run inference in an AI data center. The UK-based company developed the chip using Arm’s Neoverse family of IP CPU cores and through a partnership with Meta.
Meta is also the first customer of Arm’s AGI CPU chip, which is designed to work in harmony with the technology company’s training and inference accelerator. Arm also counts OpenAI, Cerebras and Cloudflare, among others, as launch partners.
Arm’s move to making its own silicon has been expected for some time. The company began developing the chips in 2023, according to CNBC reportand processors are already ready to order.
TechCrunch reached out to Arm for more information on the chip’s development and release schedule.
While it would be expected, the move is a historic departure from Arm’s long tradition of exclusively licensing its designs to other chipmakers. The company, which is majority-owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group, will now compete alongside many of its partners.
The fact that Arm makes CPUs, as opposed to GPUs, is also notable. GPUs, or graphics processing units, have gotten a lot of attention because they are used to train and run artificial intelligence models. CPUs are an equally important part of a data center rack.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, California
|
13-15 October 2026
In its pro-CPU promotion, Arm notes that these chips handle thousands of distributed tasks, including memory and storage management, workload scheduling, and data transfer across systems. The CPU has become the “pacing element of modern infrastructure — responsible for keeping distributed AI systems running efficiently at scale,” the company said.
This places new demands on CPUs and requires an evolution of the processor, Arm said.
CPUs are also becoming harder to find.
In March, Intel and AMD told their customers in China the waiting time for their products would be longer due to CPU shortages, Reuters first reported. Computer prices have also started to rise amid growing scarcity.
