On June 2, Rene Haas, chief executive officer (CEO) of British chip design company ARM Technology, said that blocking the export of central processing units (CPUs) that can be used for artificial intelligence (AI) to China will be challenging because CPUs are widely used and it is difficult to distinguish which ones are dedicated to AI. According to Reuters, Haas made this statement during an interview on the sidelines of an exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan that day.
Haas said banning AI CPUs would be nearly impossible because it would be difficult to set specific performance thresholds and memory bandwidth limits for CPUs, as is the case with graphics processors produced by Nvidia. If the United States wants to do that, "they have to limit everything" to the CPU, he said.
He added that the U.S. government might try to do this, but it would be more difficult to control than controlling AI chips.
According to reports, the United States has increased its efforts to deprive Chinese companies of advanced semiconductors and supercomputing equipment needed to develop key AI capabilities on the grounds of so-called "national security." While GPUs produced by companies like Nvidia have dominated the AI boom, demand for CPUs has increased dramatically in recent months as the industry quickly shifted toward "inference"—that is, deploying AI models to perform agent tasks.
Meanwhile, Intel and AMD are also seeing surges in demand for AI applications involving agents. Agents are autonomous software components that can interact with the Internet and other software without user input.
On the same day, Arm Technology also announced two new customers-ByteDance and the American data center company Oracle. These two companies will use its AGI CPU released in March. Haas said demand for its CPUs is stronger now than it was eight weeks ago.
Last month, ARM Technology doubled its demand forecast for the new CPU, projecting total revenue to reach $2 billion in the two fiscal years of 2027 and 2028, and projecting annual revenue to reach $15 billion in about five years.
Reuters mentioned that the growth in market demand is causing bottlenecks in advanced chip production.
When asked how Airliner plans to secure sufficient wafer supply from contract chip manufacturer TSMC, Haas said he met with TSMC CEO the day before. Arm is also working with Japanese company Sox Future, a company that helps other companies design custom chips. He said that South Korea "can obtain wafers and can obtain packaging" in the future.
In addition, ARM is working with customers such as Oracle and Microsoft to ensure that it has enough standard form memory chips to manufacture its AGI CPUs.
In June last year, Haas was interviewed by Bloomberg. Screenshot of the video.
This is not the first time Haas has expressed concerns about U.S. export controls to China.
In an interview with Bloomberg last June, Haas criticized the U.S. regulatory measures. He warned at the time that U.S. export controls on China could slow down overall technological progress, stifle innovation, and ultimately be detrimental to consumers and businesses.
“If you limit access to technology and force other ecosystems to grow, that’s not a good thing,” Haas told Bloomberg. “It makes the pie smaller, and frankly, that’s not good for consumers.” He also pointed out that the scale of ARM Technology’s business in China is “considerable.”
Bloomberg pointed out that as the Trump administration continues to tighten export controls on China, semiconductor companies such as ARM and Nvidia have frequently issued warnings that the export ban will force China to develop its own industry, which may ultimately be counterproductive to the United States.
From the Biden administration to the Trump administration, in order to suppress China's technological development, the United States has implemented a series of chip export restrictions and continues to tighten them. At the same time, the United States also forms cliques in an attempt to draw allies to contain China.
Just two days before Haas issued the latest warning, on May 31, local time, the U.S. Department of Commerce took action again to close a so-called "regulatory loophole" that had existed for a year. It is said that this "loophole" may allow multiple companies to export top chips to Chinese entities located outside China, including Nvidia's most advanced Rubin and Blackwell processors, and AMD's MI350x chips.