By Kanishka Ajmera
March 25 - U.S.-listed shares of Arm Holdings jumped nearly 12% in premarket trading on Wednesday after the chip firm projected billions of dollars in annual revenue from its own new artificial intelligence data-center chip.
The new chip marks a pivot for Arm, which has traditionally relied on licensing its designs to companies such as Nvidia and Qualcomm and then collecting a royalty payment based on the number of units sold.
Unlike current chips that are designed to respond to queries
as part of a chatbot, Arm's AGI CPU will be able to handle data-crunching needs of "agentic AI", a system that acts on behalf of users with minimal oversight.
Arm expects the data-center chip to generate roughly $15 billion in annual revenue in about five years, CEO Rene Haas said in an interview with Reuters.
Overall, the company expects to generate revenue of $25 billion in that period, and annual earnings of $9 per share, he said.
"Arm has not taken a baby step, say the production of a die or a chiplet for its customers; it has jumped in with both feet, developing the highly performing and energy efficient Arm AGI CPU," Citigroup analysts said.
"The industry move to inference and, in particular, agentic AI is showing the need for more CPUs."
The rise of "agentic AI" has already fueled stronger demand for similar chips, which are manufactured by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Shares of Intel were up 3.4%, while AMD rose more than 1%.
Arm is trading at 63.08 times analysts' estimates for the company's earnings for the next 12 months, compared with AMD's 26.64 and Intel's 71.27, according to data compiled by LSEG.
(Reporting by Kanishka Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)
