One can split hairs about the corporate responsibility, but I personally bought a VLSI ARM chip in the 90s. VLSI were one of the original 3 partners (along with Apple and Acorn) who owned the newly formed ARM corp and were the first to produce them (for Apple).
This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.
I don’t believe that nobody else would build it for them. This chip is not purely custom to Meta, as I understand it. Rather, ARM is going to be selling it to others and entering the market for “AI chips,” which is surely a market that some other ARM licensees want to be in. So therefore, ARM is competing with its other licensees, and in a potentially very lucrative, leading edge market, which is never a great place for an IP-focused company to be. Qualcomm, for instance, is undoubtedly annoyed at this.
Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.
The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.
The Acorn Archimedes came with Acorn branded CPUs (the "ARM250" IIRC) already in the late 80s. I can't recall what company made the chips for ARM at that time, but in the later Archimedes models it was VLSI.
After Amazon, Google, and Apple all have had successes with in house ARM, I had naively assumed Meta would do the same. Given the speeds with which they have been developed, it must not be "that hard" to spin up a chip. You could have easily framed it as a long-term plan - custom chips for the Occlus.
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.
This may not seem like an appropriate forum to say this, but this is a relevant and serious issue to neglect. With the current political climate and this relentless push for hundreds of these massive datacenters, everyone seems to have completely forgotten about the carbon emissions and climate change. These datacenters are such massive resource hogs that living near them is unviable due to their economic impact and overconsumption. Their impact on global climate, economy and even technology (talking about the RAM crunch) is much worse. But nobody seems to be keeping tabs anymore.
One thing to remember is that the climate catastrophe is not a single cataclysmic event like falling off a cliff. It's more like a lanslide that starts small and then gradually accretes into a massive disaster that's barreling towards you. And we're in it already. We're already paying a price in terms of human lives and the planet's biomass as a whole due to natural disasters that are becoming more frequent. We don't notice it because the increase is gradual.
And all that for what? Writing reports, reading emails, generating endless slop and waging wars? I'm not against AI or any other technology. But this cost doesn't seem justified considering their contributions to serious endeavors like medical research and habitat loss. This is ironic because we were talking two decades ago about ditching interpreted languages in favor of compiled languages for servers/services, in order to improve their carbon footprint. It looks like a joke today considering what these AI datacenters and crypto farms do. But we really can't really afford to forget it now. Remember that when you pay for AI with your money, someone else pays for it with their blood.
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The Acorn/Arm history is somewhat complicated due to the Arm IPO, I think.
Guess at the end of the day, no-one ever got fired for building ARM.
It is going to be a huge 24 months for RISC-V. My biggest concern is that everybody will have already placed their bets before then.
That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.
Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.
The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-...
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
One thing to remember is that the climate catastrophe is not a single cataclysmic event like falling off a cliff. It's more like a lanslide that starts small and then gradually accretes into a massive disaster that's barreling towards you. And we're in it already. We're already paying a price in terms of human lives and the planet's biomass as a whole due to natural disasters that are becoming more frequent. We don't notice it because the increase is gradual.
And all that for what? Writing reports, reading emails, generating endless slop and waging wars? I'm not against AI or any other technology. But this cost doesn't seem justified considering their contributions to serious endeavors like medical research and habitat loss. This is ironic because we were talking two decades ago about ditching interpreted languages in favor of compiled languages for servers/services, in order to improve their carbon footprint. It looks like a joke today considering what these AI datacenters and crypto farms do. But we really can't really afford to forget it now. Remember that when you pay for AI with your money, someone else pays for it with their blood.
> Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.