The British semiconductor designer Arm is reportedly planning to launch its own chip this year, after landing Meta as one of its first customers.
The move represents a major overhaul of the SoftBank-owned group’s business model of licensing its chip blueprints to the likes of Apple and Nvidia.
Rene Haas, Arm’s chief executive, is set to unveil the first in-house chip as early as this summer, according to a report in the Financial Times citing people familiar with the plans.
More than 300bn chips based on Arm designs have been shipped since the company was founded in 1990, with almost all the world’s smartphones being based on Arm technology. Moving from designing chips to making its own complete processor could also put Arm into competition with some of its biggest customers in the £500bn semiconductor industry.
Arm declined to comment. Shares in the company rose by more than 6% on Thursday after the Financial Times reported on the plans.
The Financial Times also reported that the launch of Arm’s own chip is one step in a larger plan by SoftBank’s founder Masayoshi Son to make more money from its own intellectual property by moving into AI chip production and building a vast infrastructure network for artificial intelligence.
Last month, Son unveiled his Stargate initiative with OpenAI, which will spend an estimated £400bn building AI infrastructure, with Abu Dhabi state fund MGX and Oracle also providing funding, and Arm as a key technology partner alongside Microsoft and Nvidia.
Arm’s chip is expected to be a central processing unit (CPU) for servers in large datacentres and customisable for clients including Meta, according to those familiar with the plans. Production will be outsourced to a manufacturer such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, these people said.
Another deal integral to Arm’s chipmaking project is Softbank’s expected acquisition of Ampere, an Oracle-backed chip designer of Arm-based chips for servers that could be valued at close to $6.5bn (£5.15bn).
Cambridge-headquartered Arm has more than doubled in value to $173bn since it listed on the Nasdaq in 2023, buoyed by investor interest in AI. Arm had previously been listed in London, before Softbank took it over in 2016.
Meta is the latest big tech company to turn to Arm for its power-efficient server chips instead of Intel and AMD, while Arm’s partnerships with Nvidia and Amazon have driven its rapid growth in the datacentres that power AI assistants from OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic.
