Arm Enters Silicon Business for the First Time with Data Center AGI CPU

Arm has made a significant move, stepping into production silicon for the first time in its history with the launch of the Arm AGI CPU, a data center processor designed specifically for agentic AI workloads. For over three decades, Arm has been purely an IP licensing business. With the launch of its AGI CPU series, Arm made a fundamental shift in how the company positions itself in the market. The AGI CPU is built on a 3 nm process, packs up to 136 Neoverse V3 cores, runs at a 300 W TDP, and delivers 6 GB/s of memory bandwidth per core at under 100 ns latency. It supports up to 6 TB per chip and DDR5-8800 speeds. On the I/O side, the chip features 96 PCIe Gen 6 lanes along with CXL 3.0 and AMBA CHI (Coherent Hub Interface) links. Each core handles a dedicated program thread, which Arm says eliminates throttling and idle threads under sustained load.

Specifically important in the data center business, density figures are notable. Air-cooled systems can fit up to 8,160 cores per rack, while liquid-cooled systems push that above 45,000. Data centers are expected to need more than four times the current CPU capacity per gigawatt to keep up, and Arm is arguing that x86 architecture carries too much overhead and complexity for this new class of workload. Arm claims more than 2x performance per rack versus x86, adding that this can translate to potential savings of up to $10 billion per gigawatt of AI data center capacity.

Meta is the main partner and co-developer, deploying the AGI CPU alongside its own MTIA accelerators for large-scale AI orchestration across its platforms. Beyond Meta, confirmed customers include OpenAI, Cloudflare, Cerebras, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom. On the hardware side, ASRock Rack, Lenovo, Quanta, and Supermicro are building systems around it, with early units available now and broader availability expected in the second half of the year. Ecosystem backing is broad, with over 50 companies involved, including AWS, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung, TSMC, and Micron.