AI could cure cancer in his lifetime, says Arm CEO.
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Arm's CEO says AI could help humanity cure cancer within our lifetimes. First, the industry needs to figure out how to make enough chips to power it."I've always thought that the killer app for AI is health," Rene Haas said in an interview with the BBC released on Tuesday. "AI is going to not only shorten the amount of time that those drugs can be invented, it's going to shorten the amount of time that you test them."Haas has led Arm since February 2022, after joining the British chip designer in 2013. Before Arm, he spent seven years at Nvidia, where he was vice president of its computing products business.In the interview, the Arm CEO said that AI could crack problems that humans alone might not."I believe in our lifetime, AI will help cure cancer," he said.Getting there, however, will require enormous amounts of computing power, Haas said. And the chips needed for cancer research or humanoid development are being gobbled up by AI companies planning data centers measured in multiple gigawatts."Right now, it's quite constrained. We need more fabs before we can put a data center in space, I'll tell you that much," he said. "We'll probably only put data centers in space when the biggest impediment to data centers is the cost of the data center."Haas said AI's appetite for chips and memory is at a scale the semiconductor industry hasn't dealt with before. Building new factories isn't a quick fix: fabs can cost tens of billions of dollars and take two or three years to construct.He said the industry was in an "absolutely supply-constrained environment" and expected supply to remain tight for some time.
