Arm Holdings chief executive Rene Haas has said the Arm Holdings AI cancer cure prediction is one he holds personally, telling the BBC he believes artificial intelligence will find a cure for cancer that humans alone could not achieve in their lifetimes.
Haas, who leads the Cambridge-based chip designer, said modelling how a DNA marker is impacted by cancer was currently ‘too complex’ a problem, not only for humans but for the computers that run AI today. He said that as AI models grow more sophisticated, ‘they’re going to solve it’.
Arm Holdings AI cancer cure: what the science community says
Prof Chris Bakal, from the Institute of Cancer Research, London, said the real question was no longer whether AI is used in medicine, but what data it is fed. Bakal, who is also chief executive of Sentinal4D, said his lab trains AI on data generated from patient samples rather than material scraped from the internet.
‘It does not need a giant data centre to run,’ Bakal said. ‘The future of medical AI will not belong to whoever builds the biggest computer. It will belong to whoever has the right measurements. That kind of prediction could cut years from the time it takes to develop new treatments.’
Haas made the remarks in an interview with the BBC‘s Big Boss Interview podcast. He stepped down from the board of AstraZeneca in April.
Robots, chip shortages and demand ‘off the charts’
Beyond the cancer prediction, Haas said AI would lead to widespread humanoid robots within the next five years, with the chips Arm designs fuelling self-learning machines ‘in a very large way’ across manufacturing, cleaning, security, and construction within a decade.
‘With artificial intelligence, these robots can see, learn, and essentially be reprogrammed for new tasks,’ he said. ‘The robot that was programmed to make a bed can also learn how to arrange the towels in a room, or clean the dustbins, or whatever you want to go off and do.’
On fears of mass job losses driven by AI, Haas said ‘the estimates of jobs going away and being completely replaced by machines is a bit overstated’, and that new opportunities would outweigh the disruption.
Arm’s power-efficient technology is now used in half of AI data centres worldwide, Haas said. The company has moved into selling its own microchips, and he said Facebook-owner Meta asked Arm to develop the Arm AGI chip. Demand has been ‘off the charts’, with more than $2bn worth of orders since it launched in March, according to Haas.
Despite that momentum, Haas said a shortage of chips was holding back the roll-out of AI and data centres. He pointed to plans for ‘multi-gigawatt’ data centres in France, the US and even in space, but said supply constraints remained a barrier. ‘We are absolutely in a supply-constrained environment. Can you get enough chips? We need more fabs before we can put a data centre in space,’ he said.
On the question of whether chip manufacturing could come to the UK, Haas was direct. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary for the UK to build fabs,’ he said. ‘Fabs are very expensive. They take a lot of specialised workers. They take a lot of natural resources, and there’s a pretty broad ecosystem for those.’ The government has held talks with the industry about bringing parts of the physical chip supply chain to the UK.
Arm remains a central figure in UK tech. Earlier this summer, the company’s peak share price amid the AI boom made it, in cash terms, the most valuable UK-based company in history. Haas noted that half of Arm’s employees remain in the UK and said the company was ‘by far and away the largest employer in Cambridge’.
Arm is majority-owned by Japan-based SoftBank, which also holds investments in OpenAI. The company’s chips are already used in hundreds of billions of phones, cars, smartwatches and gadgets worldwide.
