Arm has started working on solutions for SoftBank relating to Stargate but unable to provide specifics in terms of products or timelines at this time.
Arm to develop its own chips, says Stargate offers “huge potential” for “different design opportunities”
Comments made on company’s Q1 2026 earnings call
July 31, 2025 By
Charlotte Trueman
Arm is looking to develop its own chips, CEO Rene Haas said during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call.
Seemingly confirming reports from earlier this year, Haas told analysts on the call that Arm was “continuing to explore the possibility of moving beyond our current platform into additional compute to subsystems, chiplets, and potentially full end solutions.”
– TSMC
He said that the company had accelerated its investment in R&D to “ensure that these opportunities are executed successfully,” adding that owners SoftBank had expanded its IP licensing and design services agreements with Arm, and Arm was working with the Japanese conglomerate to help them build towards its “greater, broader AI vision.”
When asked if the expanded licensing and design service agreements with SoftBank related to Stargate, Haas was somewhat coy.
“At a very high level, Stargate, which is a joint investment venture between SoftBank and OpenAI, is looking to scale up to 10GW over the next number of years in terms of overall investment. That is a lot of compute, and there's a huge potential for lots of different design opportunities,” he said. “SoftBank has a very broad AI vision. We're looking to help them with that. Again, without mentioning specific products and application spaces, you can imagine in a data center that size, running different workloads around inference training and such, and today, all of the Stargate opportunities use Arm as the core CPU.
“We have a unique opportunity to provide solutions there. So a lot of that work has now started, but we're not able to give you any specifics in terms of products or timelines,” Haas said.
Despite the news, shares in Arm fell by around eight percent after the company posted its Q1 2026 results.
Revenue for the quarter was up 12 percent year-on-year (YoY) to $1.05 billion, but missed analysts ’ expectations of $1.06bn. Of that total, royalty revenue was $585 million, up 25 percent YoY, but below the $595m projected, while licensing revenue for the quarter was $468m, down one percent YoY.
“Royalty revenue is growing across all target end markets, including smartphones, data center, automotive, and IoT,“ Haas said, adding that during the quarter, Arm had signed three additional
compute subsystems (CSS) licenses with its five existing customers, which included two data center licenses.
Introduced in 2023, Arm’s Neoverse CSS simplifies and accelerates the adoption of Arm Neoverse-based technology into new compute solutions by enabling its partners to build specialized silicon more affordably and quickly than previous discrete IP solutions.
Haas also reiterated
comments made by the company in July, saying the number of customers using Arm-based chips in data centers has increased 14x since 2021, while its data center customers have reached 70,000. The company said it had also seen a 12x increase in the number of startups using Arm chips during the same period.
For Q2 2026, Arm is projecting revenues of between $1.01bn - $1.11bn, with estimates again hitting $1.06bn.
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