Arm Just Became a Different Company
The tollbooth decided to build the highway.
For the last three decades, Arm ARM 0.00%↑ has been the most elegant business in semiconductors. It designed the instruction sets that power virtually every smartphone on earth, licensed that architecture to the companies that actually built the chips, and collected royalties while everyone else did the expensive, risky work of manufacturing silicon.
It was the ultimate toll booth. And it was extraordinarily profitable → 98% gross margins, growing 20% annually, with almost no capital intensity. Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑, the most dominant chip company in the world right now, has margins in the mid-70s. Arm’s are near 100%.
That business is not going away. But today in San Francisco, CEO Rene Haas announced something that changes the entire investment thesis.
Arm is now selling its own chip.
What Actually Happened
At its Arm Everywhere event, Arm unveiled the AGI CPU — a 136-core data center processor manufactured by TSMC at 3nm, designed to work alongside AI accelerators like Nvidia’s GPUs. Meta is the launch customer. OpenAI and SK Telecom are committed. Production ramps second half of 2026.
