Arm Is Getting Into Silicon And It Could Be Game-Changer

Key Points
Arm is designing its own chip for the first time in its history.
Meta Platforms will be the flagship launch customer.
The company expects the new unit to generate $15 billion in sales annually in five years.
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After a long wait, investors finally get the news they have been anticipating for some time. Arm Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM) is launching its own chip.
Over a year ago, Reuters reported that Arm was building a customer base for its own chips, and Arm finally made those plans public at its Arm Everywhere event on Tuesday. The move makes sense as Arm had been moving downstream with its compute subsystems (CSS) designs, which go beyond its historical model as a CPU licensor.
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Now, Arm is breaking from its traditional position as a licensing company and launching its own Arm-designed chips. It's a data-center CPU, the Arm AGI CPU, which comes at a time when the company is seeing explosive growth in its data center business, as AI data center royalty revenue is more than doubling.
The chip is designed for AI data centers and running agentic AI infrastructure, delivering double the performance of comparable x86 platforms.
The chip will launch with Meta Platforms as its lead partner and co-developer, and Arm has signed up a wide range of customers, including Cloudflare, SAP, OpenAI, and others.
What the chip launch means for Arm
In the semiconductor industry, Arm has long been a leader in technology thanks to its power-efficient CPU architecture, which outperforms Intel and AMD's competing x86 architecture. That explains why Arm has more than 99% market share in the smartphone market, and why it's rapidly growing in data centers. When conserving power is crucial, developers turn to Arm.
Because of its licensing model, Arm makes considerably less revenue than its fabless semiconductor peers do. Arm brought in $4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026. Because of its competitive advantage in its technology, the company earns a sky-high valuation and has a market cap of around $140 billion, but Arm has the potential to bring in considerably more revenue without harming its licensing business model.
Arm earns wide margins with its licensing and royalty business model, but it might be able to maintain those even with its own chip, as peers like Nvidia and Micron have been able to earn even wider profit margins in the AI boom.
The timing for Arm is also opportune as demand for inference requires significant CPU capacity. According to Arm, the rise of agentic AI is expected to drive more than four times the current CPU capacity per gigawatt (GW), meaning significantly more computing power in the same envelope.
Is Arm a buy on the news?
Arm stock jumped 8% after hours on the news, showing investors were clearly pleased with the announcement.
The company expects the new chip unit to generate $15 billion annually within five years, meaning it could produce $5 billion or more in annual profit. Overall, the company expects total revenue to improve to $25 billion in five years and for earnings per share to reach $9 by then.
According to that math, Arm stock looks set to explode. If it maintained its current sales multiple, it would jump six times from where it is now. Similarly, even as its price-to-earnings ratio fell to 50, the stock would still triple.
After the stock jumped not long after its 2023 IPO, Arm has mostly traded sideways, with valuation concerns acting as a ceiling on the stock.
However, Tuesday's announcement shows why Arm deserves to trade at a premium. It still has a ton of growth potential, and the AGI CPU could be just the beginning of its silicon strategy.
While the stock is expensive, picking up shares after the latest announcement looks like a smart move. Arm is also a good candidate to buy opportunistically should we see future pullbacks from the stock.
Should you buy stock in Arm Holdings right now?
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Jeremy Bowman has positions in Advanced Micro Devices, Arm Holdings, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Cloudflare, Intel, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends SAP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.