Arm has always been in the business of designing chip architectures and designs that are sold under license to manufacturers such as Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The latter can take the models as they are, or improve them as they wish. Arm is in fact the equivalent of the seller of shovels and picks during the gold rush! But the British company now wants to get its hands dirty: it is planning to launch its own chip.
Arm is stepping up its game
Rene Haas, Arm's CEO, is expected to lift the curtain on this chip during the summer. The company has signed a major contract with Meta, which would therefore be its first customer, assures the Financial Times. It would involve equipping not smartphones, but servers; and it is the essential TSMC that would manufacture the silicon.
SoftBank, Arm's main shareholder, is also one of the promoters of the American Stargate project which aims to set up dozens of data centers in the United States for the needs of the artificial intelligence industry and especially OpenAI. It would be very profitable for SoftBank to sell the Arm chips that will equip the servers.
This server chip would only be a first step for Arm, which would intend to establish itself in the AI chip niche and to grab a large share of a semiconductor market estimated at 700 billion dollars.
For Intel and AMD, the arrival of Arm in the juicy server segment is bad news. The two x86 chip suppliers view with suspicion such a competitor who has already stripped them of everything in smartphones and who is increasingly imposing himself in traditional computers. But in truth, the plan could shake up the entire semiconductor industry, as Arm will likely want to look beyond server chips.
Source: FT
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