Arm is looking to grow its foothold in AI's next frontier: physical AI.

On Monday at Arm Everywhere China, the company's flagship conference, Arm announced several expansions to its physical AI ecosystem, with the goals of reducing fragmentation in the robotics industry and lowering the barriers to adoption to make the tech easier to scale.

In a briefing with the press, Drew Henry, executive vice president of Arm's physical AI unit, said that while the current market sits at roughly $25 billion, "we view [it] as growing and becoming one of the largest [total addressable markets] in the history of computing as this market shifts over time."

Arm announced two new initiatives to plant its flag in the ground on robotics:

• The company is expanding Arm Total Design, its ecosystem initiative aimed at simplifying chip development, into physical AI. The expansion encompasses more than 80 companies in AI hardware, software, sensors, and robotics, including firms like AWS, Hugging Face, and Unitree. The goal is to enable more streamlined development of physical AI and reduce complexity.
• As part of this expansion, Arm unveiled the Robotics Capability Framework, inviting industry experts from across the field to help create a standardized vocabulary around robotics and define "levels of increasing sophistication for robotic systems." This is comparable to the self-driving industry's levels of automation that range from Level 0 to Level 5.

Arm targeting the robotics industry isn't random. Henry said the company has already carved a place in the market and has shipped two billion units into physical AI use cases in the past 12 months, ranging from microcontrollers and sensors all the way up to compute platforms for autonomous vehicles and robotics.

"We've been in this marketplace for a very long time, but this market is poised now as AI embeds itself into physical devices, to get some really exponential growth," said Henry.

It's also not the first time the physical AI industry has called for broader coordination. Luma, a video AI and world model startup aimed at creating "multimodal AGI," unveiled the Open Physical AI Lab in June, a collaborative initiative to solve generalization by bringing together the best minds in robotics rather than siloing them in individual companies.

Our Deeper View

A lot of teams are betting on physical AI right now, with some speculating that the market could eventually overtake conventional AI and language models and may be the only path to the elusive concept of artificial general intelligence. With so much on the line, initiatives like this may be an attempt to prevent the dichotomy that currently exists between proprietary US-based AI models and open-source Chinese models from playing out in the physical AI realm. Especially when you consider that a large majority of physical AI hardware, particularly humanoid robots, is manufactured in China, the physical AI industry can't afford to be divided. Starting with something as simple as a shared vocabulary could be a first step to making the industry play nice.