The Acorn/Arm history is somewhat complicated due to the Arm IPO, I think.
Guess at the end of the day, no-one ever got fired for building ARM.
It is going to be a huge 24 months for RISC-V. My biggest concern is that everybody will have already placed their bets before then.
That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.
Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.
The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-...
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar.
But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under fire of a whistleblower / document leak cycle.
Despite all the money spent on VR labs, I always thought the pivot was much more of a Philip-Morris -> Altria thing than Dunkin' Donuts -> Dunkin'.
VR was one dream to achieve that, it’s more difficult to envision that with AI which is why I suspect he was more reluctant to embrace it. AI models are more likely to become a commodity and running inside one of the platforms of the gatekeepers, which is not what Zuck wants.
FWIW, oculus represented a true competitive advantage. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the Supernatural acquisition was temporarily blocked by the feds.
I think Apple was genuinely worried that fitness was (or still is) a killer use case and threat to Vision Pro.
The delay was enough to make FB lose focus / pivot again into AI.
As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage.
Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)
Eventually we'll get super cheap and light headsets or glasses and gaming will be pretty cool. They should have focused all in on that. It's already a huge industry
That's indeed Meta's strength area.
The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are licensing theirs for fine-tuning like we see with Cursor.
One thing to remember is that the climate catastrophe is not a single cataclysmic event like falling off a cliff. It's more like a lanslide that starts small and then gradually accretes into a massive disaster that's barreling towards you. And we're in it already. We're already paying a price in terms of human lives and the planet's biomass as a whole due to natural disasters that are becoming more frequent. We don't notice it because the increase is gradual.
And all that for what? Writing reports, reading emails, generating endless slop and waging wars? I'm not against AI or any other technology. But this cost doesn't seem justified considering their contributions to serious endeavors like medical research and habitat loss. This is ironic because we were talking two decades ago about ditching interpreted languages in favor of compiled languages for servers/services, in order to improve their carbon footprint. It looks like a joke today considering what these AI datacenters and crypto farms do. But we really can't really afford to forget it now. Remember that when you pay for AI with your money, someone else pays for it with their blood.
There has never been an energy transition that wasn’t driven by economics. From wood to whale oil to coal to petroleum. If you care about climate and not control over others, that is the place to focus.
> Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.
Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], which like most of its customers, is manufactured by a fab like TSMC.
The title is clear.
Apple is just a systems integrator
