UK chip giant Arm to sell its first in-house chip in China

UK-based company Arm Holdings has unveiled its first in-house chip designed for artificial intelligence data centers, and more importantly, plans to sell the product in China.

Rene Haas, chief executive officer of Arm, said in an online interview that the new data center central processing unit, the Arm AGI CPU, is eligible for sale in China and that the company intends to do so.

"We just don't have any customers today that we are able to talk about publicly. But we would expect the demand for this product to be just as strong in China as it is in the rest of the world," Haas said.

For more than 35 years, Arm has licensed its instruction sets and computer subsystems to the world's largest chipmakers and collected royalties on every processor made with its designs. The Arm AGI CPU marks the first time the company is producing its own physical silicon.

The company said the new venture could generate around $15 billion in revenue within five years. Arm also announced that Meta Platforms will be the first major customer for its new processor. The chip is expected to feature up to 136 cores and consume about 300 watts of power, with manufacturing handled by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.