SoftBank-owned semiconductor company Arm will start producing its own chips in 2025. Its first client will be Meta. This was reported by the Financial Times.
Rene Haas, Arm's CEO, will unveil the first chip manufactured in-house in the summer of 2025. It is expected that this chip will become a server processor for data centers, and production will be outsourced.
This is a significant change in the company's strategy, which usually only licenses chip designs to giants like Apple or NVIDIA. Producing its own chips could turn some of its current customers into competitors. After the news was announced, Arm's shares rose by more than 6%.
According to sources with knowledge of the plans, the release of Arm's own chip is only one stage in the company's larger strategy, which includes the transition to the production of chips for artificial intelligence.
In January, OpenAI and SoftBank announced the Stargate initiative, under which the companies intend to invest up to $500 billion in the creation of infrastructure for artificial intelligence. The project will also be supported by the Abu Dhabi state fund MGX and Oracle.