AI cancer cures slowed by chip shortage, says UK's biggest tech boss

The chief executive of Arm says artificial intelligence will one day help find a cancer cure that people won’t see in their own lifetimes. Rene Haas, who runs the Cambridge-based chip designer, told the BBC that modelling how cancer affects DNA is still too complex for humans and for today’s computers, but he thinks that will change as the systems get better and absorb more data.

That optimism came with a catch: the hardware race is already dragging. Haas said the current surge in AI is being held back by a shortage of chips for data centres, and he pointed to a broader supply squeeze across the industry. In his view, the demand is there already. What’s missing is enough factories and enough chips to keep up.

Arm sits right in the middle of that story. Its designs are used in hundreds of billions of phones, cars, smartwatches and other gadgets, and Haas said its power-efficient technology now runs in half of AI data centres worldwide. He also said Meta asked Arm to develop the Arm AGI chip, and that demand has topped $2bn since launch in March.

Haas sees AI spreading well beyond servers. He predicted self-learning robots will show up in manufacturing, cleaning, security, bridge building and repairs within a decade, and said they’ll be able to learn new tasks after being programmed for one job. He was also dismissive of the idea that AI will simply wipe out jobs on a massive scale, saying that view is overstated.

But he was far less enthusiastic about the UK becoming a chip-making powerhouse. Even as ministers talk about bringing more of the supply chain home, Haas argued fabs are too expensive, too specialised and too resource-hungry to make sense for Britain. Arm, meanwhile, remains a symbol of the country’s tech ambitions and frustrations: its sale to Japanese investors in 2016 still rankles, even as half its staff stay in the UK and Cambridge remains its biggest base.