Arm is gearing up to launch its own chip in a landmark moment for Britain’s most valuable technology company.

The Cambridge-based business has already signed up Meta as one of its first customers, according to a report in the Financial Times, with the chip set to be launched before the end of the year.

Arm shares rose 6% on the Nasdaq in late-trading on Thursday night in reaction to the news.

Founded in 1990, Arm has until now only designed semiconductor instruction sets, the architecture which dictates how a chip operates. It then licences that technology to customers across the world, with the Arm architecture found in devices like the iPhone, Nintendo games consoles and Apple’s latest chip, the M4, which is used in its laptops.

But the news means Arm will now be acting in direct competition with the chipmakers it licenses its architecture too, a move which could prove tricky to navigate given existing customer relationships. Arm has already been embroiled in a legal battle with Qualcomm over how its designs are licensed.

The chip about to be launched is understood to be a central processing unit or CPU, for use in data centres such as for training AI models, and is likely to be manufactured in Taiwan.

Speaking to UKTN in December, Arm’s chief architect Richard Grisenthwaite suggested that data centres were likely to be a major source of growth for the company in the coming years.

“We’re seeing the demand for computing really explode…the sky really is the limit here,” he said.

The move is the latest sign of a major strategic pivot for Arm since it was acquired by SoftBank in 2016, with the firm moving towards delivering a high margin from a smaller number of chips.

After reporting a drop in the number of chip shipments in May 2023, the company stopped publishing chip shipment figures altogether, putting the move down to a “shift” towards “higher-value, lower-volume markets.”

Read more: How Arm became Britain’s most successful tech company

Arm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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