Arm CEO: AI Will Cure Cancer

Artificial intelligence will help cure cancer within our lifetimes, according to Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm, the Cambridge-based company whose chip designs sit inside almost every smartphone on Earth. There are more than 350 billion chips using Arm technology have shipped worldwide. Haas says health is the "killer app" for the technology. Drugs can take 20 years to develop and around 95% of research and development efforts fail. He argues AI will shorten both the time it takes to discover new drugs and the time needed to test them, with some human trials eventually supplemented or replaced by AI modelling. "I believe in our lifetime, AI will help cure cancer," he tells BBC Economics editor Faisal Islam. But the ambitions Haas describes run into a physical constraint: the world cannot manufacture enough chips to meet demand. He says the industry is in an "absolutely supply-constrained environment" and expects that pressure to continue. Memory chip prices have risen sharply, smartphones are becoming more expensive, and handset demand is under pressure. Asked whether the shortage is simply a temporary bump, he says: "If it's a bump, it's a really, really big bump." The expansion of AI infrastructure is driving much of that demand. Large AI models require vast amounts of memory and computing power, while technology companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new data centres. Haas says new semiconductor fabrication plants can cost tens of billions of dollars and take two to three years to build, limiting how quickly additional supply can come on stream. That constraint also shapes his view of some of the more ambitious proposals for AI infrastructure. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have both talked about the possibility of putting large-scale data centres in space, but Haas says the immediate problem remains much closer to Earth: "We need more fabs before we can put a data centre in space." Haas also says a correction in technology company valuations or investment levels is possible. He lived through the dot-com crash and draws a distinction between that period and the current AI boom, arguing that today's computing capacity is being heavily utilised rather than sitting idle. A fall in valuations, he says, would not necessarily mean a collapse in demand for AI, which he believes will become embedded across businesses and everyday technology. Arm itself is also changing. After decades of licensing chip designs to other companies, it has begun supplying complete data-centre chips of its own. Haas says demand for its new Neoverse product rose from around $1 billion to more than $2 billion within five months, with customers including Meta, Oracle, Cloudflare and SK Telecom. Presenter: Faisal Islam Producer: Olie D'Albertanson