Arm Builds Its Own Chip for the First Time, for AI, and Meta Gets Dibs

Arm Holdings ended 35 years as a pure licensing business with the release of its first in-house chip. The AGI CPU is purpose-built for AI data center workloads. CEO Rene Haas unveiled the chip during a presentation in San Francisco. Meta signed on as the launch customer and co-development partner. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said the company worked alongside Arm to develop the chip to improve data center performance density and support a multi-generation roadmap. OpenAI, Cloudflare, SAP, and Cerebras are among seven additional companies committed to the chip. The AGI CPU carries up to 136 Neoverse V3 cores. Each core gets 6 GB/s of memory bandwidth at sub-100-nanosecond latency. The chip runs at a 300-watt thermal design power and is manufactured by TSMC using 3nm process technology. Arm states that air-cooled configurations can fit up to 8,160 cores per rack while liquid cooling allows past 45,000 cores per rack. The company claims the design delivers more than 2x performance per rack versus x86 processors. Potential capital expenditure savings reach up to $10 billion per gigawatt of AI data center capacity.