Arm launches new chip design for cloud and data center

By Jane Lanhee Lee

OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - Arm Ltd, the British chip technology firm owned by SoftBank Group Corp, on Wednesday launched its next generation of data center chip technology called Neoverse V2 to meet the explosive growth of data from 5G and internet-connected gadgets.

Arm creates underlying intellectual property that other firms such as Qualcomm or Apple then license to create their own processor chips. Arm's technology powers most mobile phones, but it has been making a big push into data center processors where Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices have long dominated.

Arm said companies like Ampere, Amazon, Fujitsu and Alibaba already develop processor chips based on Arm technology for their data centers. It said Neoverse V2 increases power efficiency, although it declined to provide specific numbers.

"Our partners are taking this and building very efficient solutions to target the problem spaces that they're going after," Dermot O'Driscoll, Arm's vice president for product solutions, said during a Q&A session about the new product. "So we do expect to see some pretty compelling data points going from V1 to V2."

Arm said that chip giant Nvidia Corp's latest data center processor Grace is built using the Neoverse V2 design.

(Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Paul Simao)