Meta partners with Arm to develop new CPUs for AI deployments

Meta said Tuesday it is partnering with Arm to develop a new class of CPUs designed to support growing AI workloads and general-purpose computing across its expanding data center footprint.

The first product, called the Arm AGI CPU, is being positioned as a more efficient alternative to legacy server processors for AI-optimized infrastructure.

Meta said the chip is meant to improve performance per rack and support large gigawatt-scale AI deployments, which the company sees as central to its push toward more advanced AI systems. The Arm AGI CPU will work alongside Meta’s custom MTIA silicon, adding another layer to the company’s broader effort to build a diversified hardware stack for training and inference.

The announcement adds to Meta’s recent flurry of infrastructure deals. In February, Meta signed a long-term agreement with AMD for up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs, and earlier this month Reuters reported that Meta laid out a roadmap for four new in-house AI chips as it scales its data centers.

Reuters reported that the AGI CPU is Arm’s first major in-house data center chip effort, marking a notable departure from its traditional model of licensing designs to partners. Reuters also said Meta is the lead design partner, that TSMC is manufacturing the chip on a 3-nanometer process, and that volume production is expected in the second half of 2026.

Arm said the AGI CPU is built for the agentic AI era, where CPUs are increasingly responsible for orchestrating accelerators, memory, storage, networking, and large numbers of distributed AI tasks. In its reference configuration, Arm says a standard air-cooled rack can hold 30 blades and deliver 8,160 cores, while a liquid-cooled design with Supermicro can scale to more than 45,000 cores per rack.

Arm also claims the chip can deliver more than twice the performance per rack of current x86 systems and says that could translate into as much as $10 billion in capital expenditure savings per gigawatt of AI data center capacity.

Arm said the AGI CPU will be available to other customers beyond Meta, with OpenAI, Cloudflare, SAP, SK Telecom, Cerebras, and others already named as launch partners. Meta also said it plans to release its board and rack designs for the CPU through the Open Compute Project later this year, which could help speed adoption across data center builders.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Meta shares were trading around $595.20, down 1.5% on the day, while Arm shares were near $135.20, down 1.2% on the day.