The chief executive of chip designer Arm (ARM) says a new wave of artificial intelligence hardware could eclipse even the vast data center market.
In a panel discussion at the All-In Summit, Rene Haas singles out physical AI, chips embedded in robots and devices, as a market that may exceed the scale of the cloud buildout.
Haas frames the opportunity as one of unit volume, driven by how many chips a single machine could carry.
“Yeah, physical AI is going to be a gigantic market. [Bigger than data centers?] Yeah, I think so.
Today, they largely use repurposed automotive chips – things that have functional safety, compliance, ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems).
But they’re not specific for actuators or specific for smaller parts of the joint. So physical AI, particularly AI that can learn, is, I think, going to be a giant market. Because the robots themselves will have tens of chips, hundreds of chips. So yeah, from a unit standpoint, it could be huge. The numbers are going to be well beyond what we see today.”
Looking at export controls imposed on US semiconductors, Haas warns that the global chip market could face structural risks if regulations fracture the ecosystem into competing standards.
“Semiconductors have not been regulated traditionally. And because of that, if you look at the real heart of what drives semiconductor growth — compute — whether it’s Intel, whether it’s Arm, whether it’s NVIDIA, that’s the West.
And why is that the West? Because that requires both innovation at the chip level and a global software ecosystem.
And the world works really well when it’s flat and there aren’t constraints relative to who you sell to or how ecosystems get built.
If you shut off the supply of a computing architecture to other parts of the world, what will happen? Certain parts of the world that have the capabilities, either in terms of people, technology, innovation. They will find a way, and they will find a way around the problem.
And once that happens, you’ve now created two parallel universes.
And then the US and the West would be at risk of that other ecosystem being an ecosystem of choice.”
Last month, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz warned that export controls on Nvidia chips are detrimental to the long-term growth of the AI and tech sectors, arguing that secrecy and chip restrictions have failed to stop rival nations from advancing.
“Keeping things a secret, I don’t think is going to work. I actually don’t even think keeping the chips to ourselves is going to work. So far, we thought that if we stop the export of Nvidia chips to China, that it will stop them from building powerful models. It really hasn’t.
So a lot of these ideas just end up retarding the growth of the US technology industry as opposed to doing anything for national security.”
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