Arm breaks from its licensing-only model with first in-house chip built for AI data centers

For the first time in its 35-year history, Arm has manufactured its own chip, expanding beyond its long-standing business model of licensing chip designs to companies like Apple and Nvidia. The new CPU, called "Arm AGI," was developed in partnership with Meta and is designed to handle AI workloads in data centers.

The chip packs up to 136 cores, runs at up to 3.7 GHz, and is built on TSMC's 3nm process. According to Arm CEO Rene Haas, the chip is meant to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient computing for AI infrastructure. Meta plans to pair the CPU with its own MTIA accelerator, as Meta's head of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, explained.

Other partners include OpenAI, Cerebras, Cloudflare, and Lenovo. First systems are already available, with broader availability expected in the second half of 2026.