Arm CEO Rene Haas says chip designer is an AI company now

The first conversation of the night was with Rene Haas, the CEO of chip designer Arm Holdings, which became the biggest IPO of 2023 when it went public last September. Arm might seem like an unlikely company to talk about AI, but the transformative technology is already leading to a big growth opportunity for the firm: In its latest reported quarter, Arm said its licensing revenue was up more than 100% year-over-year “as the demand for AI has kicked off increased investment across all end markets.”

When asked if Arm was now an AI company, Haas ultimately said yes.

“70% of the world’s population uses Arm, so I think by definition you can’t really run AI without Arm,” he told the audience.

But with great opportunity come challenges: “One of the things that make the AI problem unique is the raw number of computers that you need to run these models and algorithms,” said Haas, whose company is increasingly licensing its chip designs to the data centers that power AI. Arm chips are known for their power efficiency, but Haas said the company is looking at other ways to work with the semiconductor ecosystem to achieve more efficiency, especially as demand for data storage and compute capabilities grow.

The next conversation at the Las Vegas dinner, part of a series of lead-up events to our Brainstorm Tech conference on July 15-17, hit the sustainability topic even more head-on.

“The underlying advancement that made ChatGPT possible, we can also apply to satellite imagery,” said Chelsey Walden-Schreiner, vice president of applied science at Vibrant Planet, which uses images (and AI) to assess wildfire risk. “We can look and see what’s here and automate a lot of things that have been incredibly challenging to observe and document and understand over time.”

Raj Kapoor, co-founder and managing partner of Climactic, an early-stage climate tech venture fund, agreed that there’s lots of unlocked opportunity for AI to help address the climate crisis. But he thinks that algorithms alone are not going to be a silver bullet for any company in the space. 

“The question is, for a startup to be successful, is there private data or some other angle that you have?” Kapoor told the audience.

You can bet that AI will be a big topic all week here at CES. Hopefully, using the technology to address climate change will be too.

More news below.

Michal Lev-Ram
michal.levram@fortune.com

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This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.