Arm EVP Mohamed Awad on why agents need their own CPU, a $251B server CPU market by 2030
BenBajarin · x · 2026-10-28
Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin published a paid executive interview with Mohamed Awad, EVP of Arm's Cloud AI Business Unit, on the rise of the "agentic CPU."
- Core thesis: GPUs do the thinking, CPUs do the actions — tool calls, code execution, database queries and next-step decisions all land on CPUs.
- Awad splits AI data center CPUs into three classes: accelerator head nodes, two-decade-old cloud-native CPUs, and a new class of agentic CPUs he calls "virtual users" that never sleep.
- The accompanying chart shows Creative Strategies' base-case server CPU forecast: $62B in 2026 growing to $251B by 2030, with 25-35GW of added capacity needed for personal agent compute.
- Arm entered the merchant CPU market this year with AGI CPU, a part designed for agentic workloads, and Awad is the executive responsible for the bet.
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