Arm is releasing the first chip in its 35-year-old home

Well-known semiconductor and software company Arm Holdings is starting to produce chips after nearly 36 years of licensing to companies such as Nvidia and Apple.

At an event Tuesday in San Francisco, the company revealed Arm AGI CPUA production-ready chip designed for use in an AI data center. The UK company developed the chip using its Arm Neoverse family of CPU IP cores and through a partnership with Meta.

Meta is also the first Arm AGI CPU chip client, designed to work in conjunction with the company’s learning and inference accelerator. Arm also counts OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare, among others, as co-founders.

Arm’s switch to its own silicon manufacturing has been anticipated for some time. The company will start producing chips in 2023, according to CNBC reportsand processors are already ready to order.

TechCrunch reached out to Arm for more information about the chip’s development and release timeline.

While it might have been expected, the move is a historic departure from Arm’s past tradition of licensing to other chip makers. The company, which is majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, will be competing with many of its peers.

The fact that Arm is making the CPU, as opposed to the GPU, is also notable. GPUs, or graphics processing units, have attracted a lot of attention because they are used to train and run AI models. CPUs are also an important part of data processing.

In its pro-CPU statement, Arm says these tiny chips handle thousands of tasks, including memory and storage management, multitasking and moving data across systems. The CPU has become “a critical component of technology — the one responsible for keeping AI systems running smoothly,” the company said.

This puts new demands on CPUs and requires processor flexibility, Arm said.

CPUs are also becoming harder to find.

In March, Intel and AMD told their customers in China that waiting times for their products can be longr due to CPU limitations, Reuters reported. Computer prices have also started to rise in the middle of the growth spurt.