Rene Haas on What Makes Arm’s Chips Indispensable
It’s been a good run for Arm, the chip and software company you lead: your market cap has risen 2.5 times since your September 2023 IPO. Where do you see future growth coming from?
We have two components to the business model: licensing to get access to our technology, and then customers pay us a royalty. Some chips have one Arm microprocessor; some have hundreds, meaning we collect a much more significant royalty. And because every digital device is based on Arm, it’s a very healthy and highly sustainable growth driver.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Yes, your company estimates that 99% of “premium smartphones” run on Arm central processing units (CPUs). What is it about Arm’s architecture that makes it so indispensable?
The CPU not only runs the operating system—Android, iOS—but it needs to run all the applications, whether that’s Excel, PowerPoint, WhatsApp, Gmail. That software has all been tailored to run on Arm at inception, and converting to another CPU is just an enormous task. So that’s what keeps us sticky—it’s just running all that software.
AI software is advancing extremely quickly and far ahead of hardware. Does that mean a lot of upgrade cycles will be required?
It’s going to require a massive upgrade cycle. If you think about these new AI models, the chips [that run them] were designed years before they were even invented, so they are not optimized well. It drives a rapid upgrade cycle where the people building these systems need to have more capable chips.
Designing CPUs that can run the legacy stuff as well as bleeding-edge tech must be challenging.
That’s right. When you think about the next upgrade cycle of a phone or a PC or even a smart TV, it must run all the old software impeccably, and now it needs to run the new AI software that was just invented. In our business, what really helps us grow is the insatiable need for more compute capacity. So it’s a good kind of pressure.
Demand for compute also means demand for energy; AI data centers are very energy intensive. What are you doing to support sustainability?
Arm is the world’s most power-efficient CPU because our DNA was to build processors that run on batteries. This is why our technology is now finding its way into laptops, data centers, and why Nvidia is moving to 100% Arm-based chips for their most advanced AI platforms. Everyone is looking to maintain the same level of energy for far more compute. It’s tough because AI is advancing so quickly, but we’re playing our part.
Arm’s chairman and main shareholder, Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, is betting artificial super intelligence (ASI) will become “10,000 times smarter” than humans in a decade. Do you agree?
Computers are already being able to think like humans and reason. Those acronyms—ASI, AGI [artificial general intelligence]—everyone has a different bar for. But by the end of the decade, I think we will see some very significant changes relative to computers doing jobs that were done by humans, whether that’s call centers [or] writing software.
Some people, like TSMC founder Morris Chang, have been very critical of attempts to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S. Do you feel that the CHIPS Act has gone far enough?
We’re going to need a second CHIPS Act, a third CHIPS Act, and fourth CHIPS Act, because of the magnitude of scale to build these fabrication sites. Government funding into fabs exists in other parts of the world, so I think it’s great that the U.S. got into it, because every country is going to need some level of industrial policy around semiconductors going forward.