The chip design firm says Meta, OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare are among the first customers of its new artificial intelligence hardware.

Arm, one of the world’s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm CEO Rene Haas made his pitch for how the new Arm CPU could benefit the tech industry and why this is the right time for the company to step outside of its lane and go head-to-head with other chipmakers.

Arm’s in-house chip efforts were rumored for years. Now, as artificial intelligence proliferates throughout the economy and demand for computing resources skyrockets, Arm is trying to capture a sliver of the market for central processing units (CPUs) optimized to handle AI workloads.

The new chip is called the Arm AGI CPU, a nod to artificial general intelligence, an often-invoked but still hypothetical form of AI that could match human performance across domains. It’s designed to be coupled with other chips in high-performance servers inside data centers and to handle agentic AI tasks. The chip is being fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the world’s leading semiconductor foundry, and is being built using TSMC’s 3nm process.

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