Chip designer Arm has released an AI-focused CPU, moving into silicon manufacturing for the first time.

The Arm AGI CPU, is built to power data centres running agentic AI workloads. It was designed in partnership with Meta, which the company described as a co-developer, and will be used by the tech giant as it expands its AI infrastructure.

SoftBank-owned Arm has long been one of the most prominent designers of chip architecture, but the move into chip production signals a fundamental shift in its market positioning. The company said the move was driven by partners’ requests to deploy Arm’s technology at scale.

Currently, data centres are largely powered by chips built by US-based Intel and AMD, and CPU compute has fallen by the wayside in favour of GPUs due to their superior parallel processing performance. High-performance CPUs remain a key part of data centre infrastructure, however, acting as controllers and managers of GPU stacks.

Arm says it has already secured partnerships with major tech companies beyond Meta including Cloudflare, OpenAI and F5. These companies will use the AGI CPU for tasks including “accelerator management, control plane processing, and cloud and enterprise-based API, task and application hosting,” according to Arm’s website.

“Delivering AI experiences at global scale demands a robust and adaptable portfolio of custom silicon solutions, purpose-built to accelerate AI workloads and optimise performance across Meta’s platforms,” said Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta.

“We worked alongside Arm to develop the Arm AGI CPU to deploy an efficient compute platform that significantly improves our data centre performance density and supports a multi-generation roadmap for our evolving AI systems.”

Arm’s share price is up 25 per cent since last Thursday, with shares climbing in response to the announcement.

---