On February 13th, semiconductor design company ARM surprised the hardware industry and announced that it would create server CPUs and license semiconductor designs to other organizations. Meta was locked up as his first partner. The move will shift the arm from resources from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia to potential competitors.
According to the Financial Times, ARM CEO Rene Haas was able to view new chips by summer.
Innovation details
ARM plans to create chips for servers in large data centers
Specifically, ARM develops and sells its own CPUs intended to reside in servers in large data centers. Processors have a base architecture that can be customized by a wide range of customers. Details about the chip feature were not available at the time of writing.
The arms are not manufactured. Like many major semiconductor producers, the chip is manufactured by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Also, ARM is recruiting staff from customers, according to Reuters.
See: Datacenters can reduce energy usage by modifying just 30 lines of code on the University of Waterloo team Linux kernel network stack.
Arm is trying to create most chips on major smartphones and expand AI production
ARM, owned by SoftBank, holds important space in the semiconductor industry as a design company that licenses blueprints to high-tech giants handling implementation and manufacturing.
Most smartphones around the world include a chip designed inside the arm. For example, both the Samsung Galaxy S24 and Google Pixel 8 use AI-enabled CPUs based on ARM design. Apple’s M-series chips on the iPhone are based on the arm design.
The son of Softbank founder Masayoshi will use AR to build an AI production pipeline, the Financial Times said. Softbank also funds Stargate Project, a US-based initiative to build AI infrastructure alongside Openai, Microsoft and Nvidia.
His arm is based in Cambridge, England.
ARM chips compete with hardware powerhouses
ARM’s partnership with Meta can disrupt the businesses of other large companies with server chips such as Intel and AMD. CPUs are relatively energy efficient, so in the age of AI, their arms have already been pulled in front of Intel. Energy efficiency can create or corrupt data center plans in the age of AI workloads that gazed resources.
Selling your own chips allows you to compete directly with one of your customers, Qualcomm. ARM and QUALCOMM were caught up in a legal battle, bringing Qualcomm’s victory in December 2024. ARM suspects Qualcomm has used a Nuvia processor. However, the ju umpire was undecided as to whether Nuvia actually violated its license agreement with ARM. Therefore, the case could be sent to another trial.
Nvidia is best known for its GPUs, but its CPU products overlap with NVIDIA’s customer base. Nvidia tried to buy an ARM in 2020, but was hampered by anti-trust regulators. Nvidia still has an ARM economic interest and uses ARM for some of its designs.
