Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas has said the United States would find it difficult to block exports to China of central processing units, or CPUs, that can support artificial intelligence workloads.
CPUs are general-purpose chips used in a wide range of computers and devices. Unlike more specialized graphics chips, they are harder to restrict based on AI-related use cases alone, Haas said in a Reuters interview.
“They would have to limit everything,” he said.
Haas said that setting clear performance and memory thresholds for CPUs is far more complicated than for graphics processing units, or GPUs, such as those made by Nvidia.
“CPUs are kind of like oil relative to the application space,” Haas said, describing any broad ban as “a pretty hardcore cut.”
The United States has tightened controls on advanced semiconductor exports to China, citing national security concerns and the potential military applications of artificial intelligence.
On Tuesday, Arm announced that Chinese company ByteDance and U.S. cloud provider Oracle are among the customers for its AGI CPU, a data-center processor designed for AI-related workloads launched in March.
Arm has stated that the rise of so-called “agentic AI” systems, which can carry out tasks with greater autonomy, is creating additional demand for computing infrastructure used in AI inference, the stage where trained models generate responses and perform tasks.
In its earnings for the year ended March 31, Arm reported more than $2 billion in customer demand for the chip across its 2027 and 2028 fiscal years, which it said was double its initial target.
Arm also said in earnings materials released in May that it expects the AGI CPU product line to generate approximately $15 billion in annual revenue within about five years.
This is not Arm’s first foray into the debate over export controls. Haas has previously argued that broad restrictions on technology access could have unintended consequences for global innovation.
Arm has long maintained close ties to the semiconductor ecosystems in China and Taiwan. During his Computex keynote, Haas noted Taiwan’s role in manufacturing Arm-based chips over the past three decades. He also appeared alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The UK-based company has traditionally generated revenue by licensing chip designs but has recently expanded into selling its own silicon products. Other chipmakers, including Intel and AMD, have also highlighted growing demand for processors used in AI-related workloads.
Arm’s latest announcements come as the semiconductor industry continues to face intense competition for advanced manufacturing capacity.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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