ARM Holdings plc (NASDAQ: ARM) announced it will produce silicon products for the first time in its history, launching the ARM AGI CPU designed for AI data centers.

The ARM AGI CPU features up to 136 ARM Neoverse V3 cores per CPU with 300-watt thermal design power. The company states the processor delivers more than 2x performance per rack compared to x86 platforms and supports up to 8,160 cores per rack in air-cooled deployments.

Meta serves as the lead partner and co-developer for the new CPU. "We worked alongside ARM to develop the ARM AGI CPU to deploy an efficient compute platform that significantly improves our data center performance density," said Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta.

Additional customers committed to deploy the CPU include Cerebras, Cloudflare, F5, OpenAI, Positron, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom. Lead OEMs and ODMs supporting the product include ASRock Rack, Lenovo, Quanta Computer, and Supermicro, with early systems available now and broader availability expected in the second half of the year.

The expansion into silicon production marks a departure from ARM's traditional business model of licensing intellectual property and compute subsystems to other manufacturers. More than 50 companies across the technology ecosystem are supporting the new silicon platform, including AWS, Broadcom, Google, Marvell, Micron, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung, SK Hynix and TSMC.

TSMC will manufacture the ARM AGI CPU using its 3-nanometer process technology. The information is based on an ARM press release statement.