This seems bad, doesn’t it? I already know that there has been friction between arm and their customers over higher licensing fees since the IPO just trying to put this in context.
Softbank still owns 90% of ARM and they finished their acquisition of Ampere only a few months ago in November 2025.
I'm a chip designer and a chip this complicated takes about 3 years from start to actual silicon so it would have started well before Softbank started their acquisition process of Ampere.
The press release says it was co-developed with Meta who has a growing custom chip team. Normally these chips like Amazon's Graviton or Google's Axion are designed for their own data center use only and rented to customers. This ARM chip sounds like Meta and other companies will all be able to buy chips for their own data centers.
I'm guessing Softbank will get ARM and Ampere to align on future chips or just merge Ampere completely into ARM.
Agreed. The ARM AGI CPU supports a newer version of the vectorized instructions and has matrix math extensions that the AmpereOne M doesn’t. Also has almost twice the memory bandwidth. One paper at least, the AGI CPU seems like a better choice for AI workloads. Ampere is really pushing the AI workload use cases for the AmpereOne M, so this really makes their lives a lot harder.
Not sure how to feel about this. Does this mean ARM is slowly moving from just licensing IP to actually competing with companies building on top of it?
I think the only ARM licensee going for the hyperscaler CPU market is Ampere. Amazon and Microsoft make CPUs for themselves and Nvidia’s are aimed exclusively at AI workloads driving their GPUs.
I'm a chip designer and a chip this complicated takes about 3 years from start to actual silicon so it would have started well before Softbank started their acquisition process of Ampere.
The press release says it was co-developed with Meta who has a growing custom chip team. Normally these chips like Amazon's Graviton or Google's Axion are designed for their own data center use only and rented to customers. This ARM chip sounds like Meta and other companies will all be able to buy chips for their own data centers.
I'm guessing Softbank will get ARM and Ampere to align on future chips or just merge Ampere completely into ARM.
I can only imagine that their boardroom minutes included heated exchanges between their legal and marketing teams.