Arm Holdings shifts strategy to sell its own data center chips, targeting $15B in annual revenue

For 35 years, Arm Holdings had one job: design processor blueprints and license them to everyone else. Now it wants to sell the finished product, too. At its “Arm Everywhere” event in San Francisco, the SoftBank subsidiary unveiled the AGI CPU, its first-ever production silicon chip, purpose-built for AI data centers. The move represents the most significant strategic shift in Arm’s history, turning the company from a behind-the-scenes architecture licensor into a direct competitor to the very customers it has long served. What Arm is actually building The AGI CPU packs 136 Neoverse V3 cores into a chip with a 300-watt thermal design power. TSMC will manufacture it on its 3nm process. Meta Platforms signed on as the lead development partner and first customer. The chip is engineered for agentic AI workloads, the kind of inference tasks where autonomous AI systems need to reason, plan, and execute multi-step operations rather than just spit out a single response. Arm claims these workloads demand up to four times more CPU cores than previous AI inference processes. The AGI CPU is designed to deliver over twice the performance per rack compared to x86 alternatives, with potential cap...