Meta stated Tuesday it’s partnering with Arm to develop a brand new class of CPUs designed to help rising AI workloads and general-purpose computing throughout its increasing knowledge middle footprint.
The primary product, known as the Arm AGI CPU, is being positioned as a extra environment friendly different to legacy server processors for AI-optimized infrastructure.
Meta stated the chip is supposed to enhance efficiency per rack and help giant gigawatt-scale AI deployments, which the corporate sees as central to its push towards extra superior AI methods. The Arm AGI CPU will work alongside Meta’s customized MTIA silicon, including one other layer to the corporate’s broader effort to construct a diversified {hardware} stack for coaching and inference.
The announcement provides to Meta’s current flurry of infrastructure offers. In February, Meta signed a long-term settlement with AMD for as much as 6 gigawatts of Intuition GPUs, and earlier this month Reuters reported that Meta laid out a roadmap for 4 new in-house AI chips because it scales its knowledge facilities.
Reuters reported that the AGI CPU is Arm’s first main in-house knowledge middle chip effort, marking a notable departure from its conventional mannequin of licensing designs to companions. Reuters additionally stated Meta is the lead design accomplice, that TSMC is manufacturing the chip on a 3-nanometer course of, and that quantity manufacturing is predicted within the second half of 2026.
Arm stated the AGI CPU is constructed for the agentic AI period, the place CPUs are more and more accountable for orchestrating accelerators, reminiscence, storage, networking, and enormous numbers of distributed AI duties. In its reference configuration, Arm says an ordinary air-cooled rack can maintain 30 blades and ship 8,160 cores, whereas a liquid-cooled design with Supermicro can scale to greater than 45,000 cores per rack.
Arm additionally claims the chip can ship greater than twice the efficiency per rack of present x86 methods and says that would translate into as a lot as $10 billion in capital expenditure financial savings per gigawatt of AI knowledge middle capability.
Arm stated the AGI CPU can be accessible to different prospects past Meta, with OpenAI, Cloudflare, SAP, SK Telecom, Cerebras, and others already named as launch companions. Meta additionally stated it plans to launch its board and rack designs for the CPU by means of the Open Compute Undertaking later this yr, which might assist pace adoption throughout knowledge middle builders.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Meta shares had been buying and selling round $595.20, down 1.5% on the day, whereas Arm shares had been close to $135.20, down 1.2% on the day.
