High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / belief

Published · transcript-backed

Speaker unverified: belief

3 Sept 2026 · 19:40 No Priors Redefining Chip Architecture with Arm CEO Rene Haas

“Uh when we think about the verticals that SoftBank's involved with robotics, energy, data center infrastructure, and then you look at the products that ARM has, the only one we've announced so far is the ARM AGI CPU.”

— Speaker unverified

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
3 Sept 2026 · 19:40
Publisher
No Priors

Transcript context

…say strategic partnerships incredibly early uh whether it's with people inside the supply chain uh people in private equity you the banks the banks themselves it's a different game you know now on one hand semis are kind of back because you you now have a a wave of semiconductor startups u there was a long time where that was just not happening uh investment in the industry now we've got a lot but access to capital is going to be the the the gate for them in terms of how they how they get through that. So I think getting much more creative in terms of how they work with the ecosystem is going to be super super key. And we at and we at SoftBank that's one of the things we look at very strategically you know companies that we can bring in into the portfolio that we can help uh that we can provide combination of either uh the backs stop you know andor if you think about SoftBank we just announced we being SoftBank a SoftBank Neo uh which is our intent to become a uh a neocloud and in that world we could become a home for these young companies who have uh chip technology that in other worlds they'd have to go up and figure out how to get a design win at Microsoft or Google. Uh we can provide a lot of interesting avenues for that. >> Can you talk a little bit more about the portfolio things that Paul under your purview at SoftBank? I I know as mentioned there's ARM and then there's uh this sort of broader suite of things. So I'd love to hear we'd love to hear more about what else >> you're responsible for and we had some specific questions for some of those as well. >> Yeah. So the way the way to think about it is uh SoftBank Group which is uh headed in Japan and and and that is MASA uh have a lot of different operating companies underneath them. One of the largest ones is SoftBank KKK which is essentially SoftBank SoftBank mobile. Uh inside the US uh there's a lot of investment activity that's going on uh with SoftBank Group International. There's SoftBank Vision Fund. uh but increasingly a lot of the strategies that we're trying to do around SoftBank is helping the strategies that Masa talked about publicly at uh at the his uh shareholder meeting in Japan which is around robotics, open AAI, infrastructure and ARM. So I probably got my eyeballs on on a lot of stuff uh to be honest with you in terms of helping MASA really realize the the execution of that vision. So yes, I I I'm leading the direction of Ampier and Graphcore and uh another company called Stack AV that's doing things around autonomous. But maybe a better way to think about it, Elad is that I'm kind of in the room on a lot of discussions that Moss is having uh and helping him sort of formulate that strategy and and more importantly help execute it. Mhm. >> How does um how has uh being part of the soft bank group or working with all these different companies or even SP energy and the and um the broader ecosystem changed your point of view on what you can do with ARM? Well, one thing it does, it gives us a a huge uh bird's eyee view relative to uh where the broader industry is going, whether it's around infrastructure, whether it's around capital, whether it's around ll, one thing it does, it gives us a a huge uh bird's eyee view relative to uh where the broader industry is going, whether it's around infrastructure, whether it's around capital, whether it's around energy, but also you can imagine it could provide a home for for our products, right? So, it it doesn't need to be the home, but it certainly can be a home. Uh which is also a big, you know, a big help. Uh when we think about the verticals that SoftBank's involved with robotics, energy, data center infrastructure, and then you look at the products that ARM has, the only one we've announced so far is the ARM AGI CPU. You can start to connect the dots and say, gosh, there could be some very interesting opportunities that uh that could be an opportunity for ARM, which necessarily doesn't mean that we're getting into the broad merchant chip business. We could be just doing products simply back for for SoftBank. We're a couple years into um you know serious efforts in more uh generalized robotics at this point, right? If you compare it to like about a decade for um LLMs, there's increasingly interesting demo results from companies on generalization of task and environment, more robustness, maybe even in context learning, but not like widescale deployment quite yet. >> Um first, would you agree with that characterization? Yeah. >> What predictions do you have about the uh robotics market and um any opportunity for ARM there? >> Oh, well, broadly speaking, uh I think the whether it's humanoids or or dedicated uh machines to do certain level of tasks that can be retrained is going to be enormous, right? And the the robotics 1.0, zero, which is a purpose-built industry. Uh you had piece of mechanics designed to do a certain task and the software that was optimized for that task. If you had to a brand new automobile line came up or some different piece of equipment, if the robots weren't well suited for that, rip up the line, etc., etc. So, as as you can imagine, then the the barrier was was pretty high. getting to a world where the the robots can learn just based upon either being trained or what they see and then when you then combine that with can you design something mechanically general purpose enough that can take advantage of being reprogrammed and then when you layer on top of that the cost coming down you look at and say oh my gosh what what will it not be able to do so it's almost like something out of the Jetsons right where a lot of things will ultimately be done by robots uh construction, infrastructure, service, security. You know, right now you see a lot of stuff on Instagram or Tik Tok of Olympic races with robots, etc., etc. I don't think anyone's going to have any interest in watching a sports league of of robots. There may be an enthusiast class >> who who might be interested in that, but the the broader utility is going to be around uh a lot of human labor tasks um that will can ultimately easily be replaced by robots. There's no question. A lot of the hypothesis people have about the form factor of robotics tends to split into two or three camps. One of the camps is that they're going to be uh humanoid or roughly sort of the human ion. A lot of the hypothesis people have about the form factor of robotics tends to split into two or three camps. One of the camps is that they're going to be uh humanoid or roughly sort of the human footprint because so much of the physical world is already designed that way and the tooling is designed that way and so you can just slot robots right in. Others view it as there's going to be much more sort of specialized task specific form factors. Do you have a hypothesis on >> I think it's both. Yeah, I think it's both. There's a lot there there are a lot of jobs and work tasks that are optimized around >> a person being six feet tall and and having arms of a certain length, etc., etc. Uh but I think it'll be both you and and I think the the fact that they're going to have be smart and can learn and to answer your earlier question. ARM is going to be everywhere. Uh we are we have a tremendous amount of technology from a real-time sensing standpoint around microprocessors that will be out at the fingers. They can do perception and sensing. That's all going to be ARM based. uh today whether it's Nvidia or some of the work that Qualcomm does most of the brains the brains that you see in the humanoids those are all all running on ARM uh today so I think for us going going forward robot the robotic industry will be powered by ARM >> are you seeing any early indications I mean you have this great seat to your point where given the ubiquity of ARM and a lot of these different types of devices you can kind of see the future before others in terms of where adoption is happening or where shifts are happening from a technology perspective Are there specific pockets that you think will be most likely the early adopters of robotics that you're starting to see some signal from? >> I think it's still a little bit early because the business models have not been actually figured out. The co the cost of robots are so high, right? Because the cost of robots are so high, people buying the robots themselves. That's a that's a tough it's a tough model to sort of get people's heads around. Does it actually replace? So I think costs need to come down and the business model need to be need to be uh ultimately vetted because another robotic footprints tend to be things like automotive or um certain surgical robots or data or uh excuse me distribution centers right there's a few very sort of bespoke applications that I think are mostly robotic sales today and so that's why I was a little bit curious >> distribution centers for sure I mean that that can ultimately go completely automated right relative to and even to the ultimate to the delivery right uh and and you can question >> to me loosely speaking a a truck that has an autonomous is a robot of sorts. So around factory automation and delivery and distribution that will be one of the very first to be automated. No doubt >> there is increasing you know debate and uh very quickly like policy or EOS around supply chain controls and usage controls around both robotics um and chips and data centers right um sorry I'm going to throw export controls in there so four types of controls um all all uh all of these…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence