By Max A. Cherney
TAIPEI, June 2 (Reuters) - Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas said on Tuesday that it would be difficult to block the export to China of CPUs that are useful for AI because of their widespread use and as it would be difficult to block only AI CPUs.
"CPUs are kind of like oil relative to the application space," Haas said in an interview with Reuters. "That's a pretty hardcore cut."
Banning artificial intelligence CPUs would be nearly impossible because of the challenge of establishing specific
performance thresholds and memory bandwidth limits as is possible with the graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Nvidia, Haas said.
"They would have to limit everything," he said, adding that the U.S. could attempt to do so but it was a harder area to control than AI chips.
The U.S. has stepped up efforts to starve Chinese firms of advanced semiconductors and the supercomputing equipment needed to develop critical AI capabilities, citing national security concerns. It has also taken steps to halt Nvidia AI chip shipments to Chinese companies outside of China, Reuters reported.
On Tuesday, Arm announced Chinese tech company ByteDance and U.S. data center firm Oracle as new customers for the company's AGI CPU.
Demand for the Arm data center central processing unit (CPU) is stronger than it was eight weeks ago, which is one of the reasons the company could announce two new, large customers, Haas said.
The company expects the data center chip to generate about $15 billion in annual revenue in about five years, a new line of business for the storied British company.
In May, Arm doubled its guidance for demand for the new chips to $2 billion across fiscal 2027 and 2028.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have also seen a surge in demand because of AI applications that involve agents, or autonomous pieces of software that can interact with the internet and other software without user input.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in Taipei; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Kate Mayberry)
