Arm wants to develop its own AI processor. This should be ready next year and be rolled off the assembly line in large quantities by the end of 2025.

Arm will develop AI processors at the suggestion of parent company Softbank. The Japanese investment company owns 90 percent of Arm and wants to focus heavily on AI. The development of the new processors should be completed next year. The chips are expected to roll off the assembly line by 2025. Nikkei knows this.

It’s unclear whether Arm focuses on chips for reasoning or training. In any case, SoftBank wants to build data centers in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, equipped with chips from Arm. This is planned for early 2026.

Experience

Arm doesn’t yet build chips specifically aimed at AI, but it has extensive experience in the field. For example, the company’s Neoverse designs are a popular basis for data center chips such as AWS’s Graviton and Google’s Axion. With Neoverse, the ARM architecture is evolving into a powerful and economical alternative to x86. Such efficiency will be very useful for traditionally very power-hungry AI chips.

Arm is also working with Nvidia on the Grace Hopper superchip. In this way, the arm’s designs have already proven themselves in the AI ​​context, although again this affects the CPU component. Arm has less experience with accelerators, although the Adreno GPUs on Qualcomm mobile chips are the best of their kind year after year.

Room for better alternatives

Softbank and Arm’s ambition is not surprising in a world where demand for AI hardware is outstripping supply. Additionally, if Arm can transfer the efficiency of the ARM architecture to a new AI chip, the company will have an attractive alternative to today’s Nvidia chips.