Arm Poaches Employees from Clients to Set Up Own Chip Manufacturing

British Arm, the creator and licensor of the processor architecture of the same name, has begun to poach employees from its own clients. With their help, the company wants to create its first processor to compete with other chip manufacturers such as Nvidia and Qualcomm. This is reported by the news agency Reuters, citing informed sources.

Image Source: Arm

Arm’s business currently involves licensing intellectual property, such as processor cores, to other companies. The British company’s architecture is used by a variety of manufacturers, including Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Arm itself is looking to increase revenue, and plans to use a variety of tactics to do so, one of which could be chip manufacturing.

Producing its own processors would allow Arm to transform its business model and become a competitor to its current customers. This could impact an industry where Arm has long been a neutral player. At this stage, Arm wants to develop a processor aimed at data center use.

According to Reuters, the company has been in talks with senior executives at some of its clients since at least November last year. A document obtained by the agency from an Arm recruiting manager said the company was interested in hiring an executive who would help “transition from developing processor architectures to selling proprietary chips, with a focus on supporting artificial intelligence in data centers” and other devices. According to the source, Arm employees have been reaching out to other representatives of Silicon Valley chip makers in an attempt to lure talent to the company.

The report says that Arm wants to compete with Qualcomm. The company has been in talks with Meta✴ Platforms to supply its own Arm chips to Meta✴ data centers and has even made some progress in doing so, signing a deal with the social media giant. Another source familiar with the matter said that talks between Arm and Meta✴ have not yet been completed. Officials from the companies have declined to comment on the matter.