Arm CEO Rene Haas speaks to Bloomberg's Tom Mackenzie as the chip company positions itself for a major shift beyond smartphones, betting big on the rapid growth of cloud computing and data centers.
This interview was recorded on March 23 for "Bloomberg Tech: Europe."
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Questions asked in this interview
11
0:15How significant is that for this company as a strategy?
1:11What is the potential size of this new revenue stream, of this new market?
1:38How challenging does that make your role as CEO of a company that has that global scope?
2:14Do you think governments understand where the real leverage is in the chip stack?
2:44Do you personally have to feel the weight of that responsibility at that moment? What do you think?
3:30How do you navigate having to meet quarterly earnings with massive, massive sessions, grand sweeping visions of how this kind of tech plays out?
4:36Are you concerned about what's going on on that?
5:18Or are they going to be fast followers? What's your take?
5:34And a company like Arm, are you going to be in five, ten years' time, are you going to have more employees or fewer?
7:01Where can Europe compete when it comes to semiconductors?
What's happening inside Arm is we are shifting away from being largely known for smartphones to being around the cloud and data centers, where in a few years that's our largest business by far, and in five years it'll be orders of magnitude larger than what we do in smartphones for the first time.
Arm designing its own chips, its own CPUs, the whole package, and you're working with Meta for this. How significant is that for this company as a strategy?
I think it's very significant. When we looked at the opportunity, particularly in the data center with the growth of AI, but more specifically agentic AI, and agentic AI quadruples the demands on CPUs. We look at two things. Number one, this is a market that's heavily underserved at the moment. And number two, customers are asking us, would you deliver and build a chip for us? So to your point, yes, we now have our first product. It's Arm's product. It's the Arm Neoverse CPU, designed by Arm, built by TSMC, sold to customers like Meta or SAP or Cloudflare, OpenAI, a litany of customers that we've announced, and the demand has been extremely strong.
When we look at the royalties in our traditional business model associated with the cloud and AI business, it's about a $3 billion TAM. When we look at the potential of this product line, maybe stretching out four or five years, it's north of $100 billion. So it is profoundly different in terms of the scale. It puts us in a whole different zip code.
Semiconductors have increasingly become a tool of geopolitics as well. How challenging does that make your role as CEO of a company that has that global scope?
Five years ago, maybe, maybe a little bit less, it wasn't something we worried about. We may have had people inside Washington or working with people at Number 10 to make them aware of the technology. But it wasn't something that was, you know, top on the radar, you know, visiting Washington or getting to know the folks inside DCMS, inside the UK. That was not something that a CEO had high on your priority list of things to do. That's all changed.
I think they're increasingly learning that. I would say ten years ago, not so much, but they've certainly added lots of capability in terms of people. If you look at the US government, in particular in the current administration, they've added David Sacks, who's the AI tsar, and under David's team, he's put a tremendous amount of people, capability and people to go off and learn that. You know, same thing under Peter Kyle and then Liz Kendall in the UK.
And you're stewarding this technology that underpins billions of devices. Do you personally have to feel the weight of that responsibility at that moment? What do you think?
Wow. When you're in it on a day-to-day basis, you don't really think about that kind of scale. But sometimes when I step back and when we're talking amongst the teams, we're preparing some materials for a launch and we try to communicate the scale of what Arm does, we come up with the number of 350 billion chips. And people like to talk about, well, how many chips does a certain person use? 350 million chips. There's 117 billion humans that ever lived on Earth, ever. And we're three times that number. That scale is enormous. Yeah.
12 more exchanges in this transcript
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Haas, R. (2026, April 10). Arm CEO Haas on Shifting From Smartphones to AI [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Tech. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3017583/
MLA
Rene Haas. "Arm CEO Haas on Shifting From Smartphones to AI." Bloomberg Tech, 10 Apr. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3017583/.
BibTeX
@misc{haas2026_3017583,
author = {Rene Haas},
title = {Arm CEO Haas on Shifting From Smartphones to AI},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Tech. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {apr},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3017583/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
