Arm is launching the first in-house chip in its 35-year history

Popular semiconductor and software company Arm Holdings has begun manufacturing its own chips after nearly 36 years of licensing its designs to companies like Nvidia and Apple.

At an event Tuesday in San Francisco, the company unveiled the Arm AGI CPU, a production-ready chip designed to run inference in an artificial intelligence data center. The UK-based company developed the chip using the Arm Neoverse family of IP CPU cores and through a partnership with Meta.

Meta is also the first chip customer for the Arm AGI CPU, which is designed to work in harmony with the technology company’s training and inference accelerator. Arm also counts OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare, among others, as launch partners.

Arm’s move to manufacture its own silicon has been expected for some time. The company began developing the chips in 2023, CNBC reports, and the processors are already ready to order.

TechCrunch has reached out to Arm for more information regarding the chip’s development and release timeline.

Although this may be expected, the move represents a historic departure from Arm’s long tradition of exclusively licensing its designs to other chipmakers. The company, in which Japan’s SoftBank Group holds a majority stake, will now compete alongside several of its partners.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Arm produces the central processing unit (CPU), rather than the graphics processing unit (GPU). Graphics processing units, or GPUs, have attracted a lot of attention because they are used to train and run AI models. CPUs are an equally important part of a data center rack.

In its pro-CPU presentation, Arm points out that these chips manage thousands of distributed tasks, including memory and storage management, workload scheduling, and data transfer across systems. The CPU has become “the speed component of modern infrastructure — responsible for keeping distributed AI systems running efficiently at scale,” the company said.

This places new demands on CPUs and requires processor development, Arm said.

CPUs are also becoming more difficult to obtain.

In March, Intel and AMD informed customers in China that wait times for their products would be longer due to CPU shortages, Reuters originally reported. Computer prices have also begun to rise amid the growing shortage.