Arm’s CEO Insists the Market Needs His New CPU. It Could Piss Everyone Off

Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to him immediately: “People are going to say ‘Arm’s CEO sleeps on the job,’” he says.

Still, Haas obliges. He gives us 46 minutes of his time, then shoos us out so he can hop on a call with Masayoshi Son, the Softbank CEO and chairman of Arm’s board.

I’m meeting with Haas just days before the chip firm’s momentous announcement that it’s launching its own silicon. For a company that's made its fortunes licensing its architectures to other chip companies and never fabricating its own, the move is a huge bet. Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Qualcomm all make or sell chips based on Arm, either licensing the chip designs or paying royalties to the firm. It’s been estimated that there are three Arm chips for every human on Earth.

Seen another way, though, making a chip marks a return to Arm’s roots. The company goes back to the late 1970s, when two computer architects started a company, Acorn Computers, that produced a microprocessor built on an architecture known as RISC. By the early ’90s the company was flailing, and the then CEO pivoted to licensing its designs to other companies. Fast-forward to the mid-2010s, and Arm’s power-efficient mobile chip designs helped make it the most important chip IP company in the world.

Arm’s trajectory hasn’t all been smooth. After Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 and took the publicly traded company private, the smartphone market’s growth slowed. Arm had to make an aggressive push into new lines of business. In 2020 Nvidia tried to scoop it up and regulators blocked the deal. As that deal collapsed, in 2022, Haas stepped into the CEO role. He took Arm public again, with Softbank still owning 90 percent of the company.

Haas had joined Arm in 2013 from Nvidia, where he’d led the computing product business unit, and eventually took over Arm’s cash cow, the IP products group. Similar to the way Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang leans on his decades-long perspective of the industry—gather ’round the campfire, kids, while I tell you about the early days of parallel computing—Haas is quick to reference 1980s geopolitical chaos when asked whether current events make him worry about his business. (No.) He’s met with President Donald Trump half a dozen times, he tells me, but he’s not particularly concerned about the US government interfering in his UK company’s affairs. He is tall, though not particularly foreboding, and often wears Saint Laurent boots with little heels, a blazer, and a Panerai watch.

Chip industry insiders say Haas, 63, is a masterful networker who pals around with the biggest names in tech. The Wall Street Journal once labeled him a “natural-born diplomat.” But with this chip project, one of the most loosely held secrets in the Valley, Arm—and Haas—risk rankling some of the company’s most loyal partners. Can you stay besties with people if, after years of polite dinner parties, you announce you’re buying their house? Haas seems convinced he can.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Lauren Goode: Since you became CEO, people say that there's been a big culture change. Do you agree with that assessment?

Rene Haas: The thing that I've learned—I knew this intrinsically when I worked for Jensen, but I certainly internalized it when I took over here—is that the CEO sets the tone for the company.

My training, which ultimately develops who you are as a leader, was really accelerated by moving to Silicon Valley 30 years ago, working with a few startups and then working for Nvidia. And the common theme between all those companies is that I was working for founders. At the time I couldn't tell you, "Oh, working with founders, that's the kind of environment that I resonate with." But looking back, that’s where I think my DNA was shaped and where I found the environment I thrive in.

What kind of environment is that exactly? Taking risks, bold growth, fast markets, making mistakes, but at the same time, being willing to take big bets. So when I took over here, I said, that’s the kind of culture I want.

Was this Arm silicon project already in the works when you became CEO?

No.

How much of this was your idea, and how much of it was Masa’s?

Was it his decision? No. I’m the CEO. Was he very aware and involved in the trade-offs and various things we looked at? Hundred percent. But this was more from a brainstorming perspective, as a partner of ideas, as opposed to your boss telling you, “Yes to this, no to this.” He’s not into that level of detail.

One of the benefits from SoftBank’s 90 percent ownership of ARM is that he's our chairman, and he's our biggest shareholder, and as a result of that he’s someone I talk to all the time. We're pretty close.

One analyst told me you talk to Masa 10 to 12 times per day.

Some days. He does like to talk on the phone. I am up all hours. He knows my personal schedule very well. He knows when I get up, he knows my workout schedule. He knows when I go to sleep. He's pretty good about all that.

What made you think this is the time for Arm to do this chip?

So somewhere along the way, we morphed from an IP company into a compute platform company. And by that, I mean, when you think about the role the CPU plays in any ecosystem, there's such an interdependency between the hardware of the CPU and the software ecosystem, whether it's running Windows or macOS or iOS or Android or Linux. I don't think we acknowledged it or I don't think we understood its importance, but when I took over, I definitely knew that this was who we were and it was something that we had to advance.

So why would we build a chip? When you’re a compute platform company, there are times when the ecosystem benefits from you physically building something. We've seen this in the past, whether it's Microsoft building a Surface laptop that helps the Windows ecosystem, while HP and Dell and Lenovo are still building laptops; or whether it’s Google building a Pixel phone, but meanwhile, Samsung still builds Android phones.

Those products are still a sliver of their businesses.

But it benefits the ecosystem. If you think about Gemini on a Pixel platform, if Gemini is optimized on Android, it helps Samsung. If you think about Microsoft developing tools or applications for Surface that benefit Windows, it will benefit HP, Lenovo, and Dell.

That’s the thing that I think people haven't always understood about us. They say, "Oh, it's an IP company." But the IP that we deliver is a compute platform, and ultimately platform companies need to do things to move the ecosystem forward.

What’s the new chip called?

It’s the Arm AGI CPU.

AGI as in, artificial general intelligence?

That's right. You like it?

I don’t dislike it. I wonder if AGI is a term that's going to go out of fashion at some point, as the industry collates around some other ideas of super intelligence.

I'm betting it won't.

Who's your target customer for this?

The first customer is going to be Meta. But we also have SK Hynix, Cisco, SAP, Cloudflare. We have multiple customers.

And this is a chip designed for data centers.

Data centers.

What makes this chip special?

There's a number of things, but one is that it's unbelievably power-efficient. This company was born from building chips to run off of batteries or in mobile phones. So we have this mindset around efficiency. And everything that you hear about the growth of AI is how much energy is needed. So anything you can do to deliver the world's most power-efficient server CPU is all goodness. This is going to be the most power-efficient CPU.

The other thing that it’s going to be incredibly good at is running agentic AI. One of the myths out there has been that with the