Shares of Arm Holdings (ARM +13.58%) popped on Wednesday after the compute platform unveiled an intriguing new artificial intelligence (AI) chip.
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A strategic shift
Arm has historically licensed its chip designs, instruction set architectures, and other intellectual property to a wide array of chipmakers. Arm's technology, in turn, has been used in hundreds of billions of devices.
Now, however, the British tech leader is creating its own AI-focused central processing unit (CPU). The Arm AGI CPU is designed to power AI data centers and tailored to run agentic AI workloads.
"Today marks the next phase of the Arm compute platform and a defining moment for our company," CEO Rene Haas said in a press release. "With the expansion into delivering production silicon with our Arm AGI CPU, we are giving partners more choices all built on Arm's foundation of high-performance, power-efficient computing."
NASDAQ: ARM
Key Data Points
Tech giants are lining up to be customers
Meta Platforms, which helped to co-develop Arm's new chip, will be a core customer. Other tech leaders, including OpenAI, Cloudflare, and SAP, are set to be among Arm's initial customers. Arm also plans to partner with the major cloud computing platforms, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
In all, Arm expects its new chip to produce a whopping $15 billion in annual revenue by 2031. The company generated a total of $4 billion in sales in fiscal 2025.
Arm's new chip sales won't enjoy the same profit margins as its existing royalty revenues. However, this massive new revenue stream is still likely to be highly lucrative, much to the delight of Arm's shareholders.
