British microprocessor designer Arm Holdings rose around 20% on the New York Stock Exchange this Wednesday after announcing that it will begin to commercialize a chip designed by the company itself, a new strategic move in this business in which the giant Meta will be the main client.
Arm shares soared from $57.13 at Tuesday's close to an intraday high of $68.58 per share, after announcing the launch of Arm AGI CPU, its first CPU for data centers with artificial intelligence workloads.
"AI has radically redefined how computing is built and deployed. Agentic computing is accelerating this change," said Arm CEO Rene Haas.
With this step, Arm advances its platform strategy, which moves from focusing exclusively on selling intellectual property and computing subsystems to also incorporating internally developed silicon products, in line with the profound transformation the industry is undergoing due to the rise of AI.
Arm's new CPU aims to respond to the growing volume of data generated by AI systems, which is increasing at high speed and requires a much larger number of CPUs to manage the reasoning, coordination, and efficient movement of that information.
According to the company's forecasts, data centers will require up to four times the current CPU capacity, driving the need for a new generation of processors specifically designed for AI-scale infrastructures, capable of sustaining a high number of transactions with adequate performance.
In this context, Meta joins as a key partner of Arm, and both companies have signed an agreement whereby the US technology company will become the largest buyer of this chip, in a collaboration that both parties are confident will be maintained for several generations of this new CPU.
"Delivering AI experiences at global scale requires a robust and adaptable portfolio of custom silicon solutions, specifically designed to accelerate AI workloads and optimize performance across Meta's platforms," said Meta's infrastructure director, Santosh Janardhan.
In addition to Meta, Arm has closed commercial agreements with other technology partners such as Cerebras, Cloudflare, F5, OpenAI, Positron, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom, which will incorporate the new Arm CPU in certain use cases.
"With the expansion into silicon production with our Arm AGI CPU, we offer our partners more options, all based on Arm's robust platform for high-performance, low-power computing, to support agentic AI infrastructure at a global scale," concluded the CEO of Arm.