Who will take the lead in the AI automotive race? 🚗💨 Host Olivier Blanchard is joined by Dipti Vachani, SVP & GM, Automotive Business at Arm on this episode of the Six Five On The Road at CES 2025 to discuss how Arm aims to shape innovation in the automotive industry, highlighting its contributions to the next generation of AI-enabled vehicles.
Their discussion covers 👇
- The biggest automotive technology trends in 2025
- How Arm leverages its smartphone and datacenter market expertise in the automotive industry
- Arm’s role in fostering collaborations within the automotive ecosystem to streamline and expedite development processes
- The widespread adoption of Arm technology across various vehicle applications by partners
Learn more at Arm.
Watch the video below at Six Five On The Road at CES 2025, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Or listen to the audio here:
Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Olivier Blanchard: Hi, and welcome to another episode of Six Five On The Road live from CES. This time, CES 2025. I’m Olivier Blanchard, Research Director with The Futurum Group, and I’m here with Dipti Vachani, SVP and GM of the automotive business at Arm. So welcome. Thanks for doing this. Let’s jump right in because I have five big questions to ask you. So Arm is best known for its pervasiveness in the smartphone market and its growth in data centers, right. But how does Arm work with partners in the automotive industry, number one, and how pervasive is Arm architecture in today’s cars?
Dipti Vachani: Well, I’ll start with the second part of the question. 94% of global vehicles today use Arm technology. So yes, we are incredibly pervasive. We’ve been in this industry for over 30 years. It is one of the pillars of growth for the company. And as you can imagine, with electrification, more autonomy, more user experience, the number of components and silicon going into cars is only going up. And so this market is a huge potential for Arm and for our entire ecosystem.
Olivier Blanchard: Right. So speaking of that, and by the way, that number is just really crazy-
Dipti Vachani: It is crazy, isn’t it?
Olivier Blanchard: … because… Yeah. A lot of people probably don’t realize that. And when I first heard it, I thought, is that possible? And then, yeah, it actually makes sense.
Dipti Vachani: It is. Well, I mean, I… another way to say it, I’d be hard-pressed to find a car that doesn’t have Arm in it. And I’ve looked around, but it’s amazing that we’re… our ecosystem that we’ve created is so relevant for what we’re trying to do in vehicles as well with AI and user experience. All of the same kind of basic elements that we need elsewhere as well in the industry.
Olivier Blanchard: Yep. So you’re kind of uniquely placed then since you’re pretty much everywhere, to talk to me a little bit about some of the trends that you’re seeing at CES in the automotive segments and also to kind of give me some insight into which ones we’ll continue to see a lot more in 2025.
Dipti Vachani: Yeah. So there’s… The automotive industry has some three major trends that we’re seeing. One electrification, and of course, we know about that, autonomy. And this isn’t about fully autonomous vehicles necessarily, but it’s just more and more autonomy in the car, right. And then, like I said, the user experience. Just we’re redefining what the user experience in a car is. What your UI looks like. How do you not only the safety, but how do you entertain in the vehicle? So those are the three major trends, and they’re kind of all interdependent, and they have some common elements to it, and of them is low power, right. It just matters. Whether it’s electrification or gas vehicle, low power matters and it matters more than ever now with silicon because the amount of silicon content a car going up, and with our history in mobile where low power is fundamentally how we think. I always talk about creating something that’s low power starts with the culture of the company. It starts with the basis of every decision you make in the design. Is power what you think about? And maximizing the performance, of course. And so low power and our history and low power really helps us in that space. Heterogeneous compute, right.
Olivier Blanchard: Mm-hmm.
Dipti Vachani: It’s GPUs, CPUs, so all the technologies. If you think about it’s cameras. It’s a UIV screen, AI. It’s across the board of the vehicle, and more and more software that’s required for our AI. And where there is AI, there’s Arm. Arm is everywhere where there’s an AI technology. And so all of these things are creating a very complex environment for our customers to navigate.
Olivier Blanchard: Right.
Dipti Vachani: Right.
Olivier Blanchard: Where there’s AI, there’s Arm.
Dipti Vachani: You like that.
Olivier Blanchard: I’m going to remember that.
Dipti Vachani: Yeah.
Olivier Blanchard: I do like that actually. Yeah. And it’s factual. So kind of following up on that, so you’re working with every major auto OEM, and you’re deeply ingrained in all the technologies that go into the vehicles. I guess my next question is regarding roadmaps and especially with how long it takes to actually develop vehicles and software-defined vehicles specifically. When you’re looking at the roadmap of all of these automakers, what do you see in terms of what’s coming, some of the technologies that they’re particularly interested in, or the ones that they’re really focusing on in terms of getting in them vehicles and also sort of creating differentiation as well and value for users and consumers?
Dipti Vachani: Well, it’s interesting. So it has started… When I talk to OEMs, there are kind of three major things that I… common trends that I see that they’re worried about. And one of them is I want to control the speed of my innovation. The competition is fierce. It’s a level of competition that this industry hasn’t seen in a long time, right. We have new income incoming into this market, and so I need to control the speed of my innovation. Number two, I need to control the user experience. And so, because there’s so many of these vertically integrated solutions, whose experience is it really? Is it a Mercedes experience? Is it a Volkswagen experience? Whose experience is it? And you see these companies, and we’ve worked very closely with Mercedes to really control the experience and the vehicle. And then they’re saying, “Scalability. I have all this software, all this autonomy, all this AI. I can’t make it bespoke for every vehicle I have.”
I saw this comparison once with Apple and the iPhone, and how many models they have versus how many models, let’s say, a Volkswagen has. It’s a completely different world of scale that they have to think about it and unique models to have to write software for. So they have to have scalable solutions, and that’s why they work with us because our ecosystem enables them to get control over their software, have control over their… of their speed of innovation because now it’s not a vertically integrated solution. They can now start to piecemeal some of the solutions together to really create that unique experience that is that OEM’s unique experience. And so I think what you’ll see… what we’ll see in their roadmaps is them and starting to lean in and start to take more control over that speed of innovation, speed and control over their software, right.
Olivier Blanchard: Right.
Dipti Vachani: We’ve heard a lot of talk about whether they’re making their own silicon or who’s making their own silicon. It’s really about software. It really is. How much can I control my experience? And that’s the softer side of things. And so that’s where Arm’s ecosystem of 20 million developers really helps the OEMs innovate.
Olivier Blanchard: Right. So you have this baseline of consistency and predictability that they can build on, and then, on top of that, they can build the customizations.
Dipti Vachani: Right. Right.
Olivier Blanchard: So you have that flexibility.
Dipti Vachani: And one of the questions you asked earlier, I wanted to add to that. What we create is this technology that’s across our entire ecosystem. And then, for automotive, we make it very specific to the safety and security that’s required. So they get to leverage all of the goodness that is our ecosystem, but while still getting the safety and security because that’s a compromise not anyone’s willing to make, and we don’t want them to make, right.
Olivier Blanchard: Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, actually, you started answering my next question, so that’s good. No, it’s good. So we-
Dipti Vachani: Well, we wanted a conversation.
Olivier Blanchard: It’ll be shorter. So talking again about software-defined vehicles, and it’s something that I struggle with a little bit when I talk about the automotive industry with journalists, with pretty much everybody else, they always want to talk about EVs. They don’t necessarily understand that there’s sort of like a parallel or overlapping track of software-defined vehicles. And really, for me, the big opportunity or the more interesting opportunity is the software-defined vehicle part of it, not necessarily just the drivetrain, right.
Dipti Vachani: Mm-hmm.
Olivier Blanchard: So having talked about all the things that we talked about already, the sort of baseline predictability platform that you can customize on. If it’s AI, it’s Arm. All of these things and the security now. What are you seeing in terms of the future that Arm plays or the role that Arm plays in the future of automotive design and automotive experiences?
Dipti Vachani: Wow. Let’s go back to… Let’s talk about software-defined vehicles and then I’ll lead to that. I have a keynote that I did, which was Software-Defined Vehicles as Survival for the OEMs. And I truly believe it is survival because the amount of software is exploding that is in the car. Just to get it up perfect and get it right and get it exact before that car leaves is just not possible anymore, right. And you’d be the amount of R&D required to go do that. So you need to have an environment in which you can load new software, load new capabilities into that car. And that’s why the capability of software-defined vehicle. And again, even and the user is also comfortable with that, right. We’re getting used to this element of our car being uploaded and updated as time goes by. And so I think software-defined vehicles is here to stay, and we are seeing a trend to most OEMs transitioning to that. Then how does Arm play in that? Well, we’ve got the luxury of having the technology that’s in the cloud.
So our v9 technology, you may have seen announcements with Amazon. You’ve seen announcements with NVIDIA and the technology they use in the data center that’s all Arm-based, right. The car, 94% of cars use Arm technology today. So that’s Arm-based. Now you have this software parity between the cloud, ISA. We call it ISA parity between the cloud and the car. And the ability of software in the cloud that we know can be deployed in the car in a reliable, safe way is what we’ve created with our software-defined vehicle technology and an initiative what we released a few years back called SOAFEE. And that initiative works across the industry to solidify that environment from the data center to the cloud and make a reliable environment for two reasons. One for software-defined vehicles, but also a virtual platform so you can start writing that software before the vehicle’s ever seen the light of day or even the IP’s seen the light of day.
Olivier Blanchard: Right.
Dipti Vachani: Again, because we need to shift left that software development, enabling the OEMs to control their speed of innovation, which is what they’re very concerned about.
Olivier Blanchard: Right. So there’s also the training and…
Dipti Vachani: Yes.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.
Dipti Vachani: There’s a big element of that that needs to start early.
Olivier Blanchard: Correct. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So what are some of the recent innovations, I think, that best highlights Arm’s value and role in the automotive industry? Some of the innovations that kind of jump out at you that people should either focus on, they might already be aware of them, but also there might be some things that they’re missing that you might want to highlight. What are those?
Dipti Vachani: Wow, there’s quite a bit. One of the technologies, one of the capabilities that in our latest architecture release, which is a v9 architecture, has the ability to have isolated workloads. So we’re able to create containers in which these workloads are completely isolated, and that’s in our architecture kind of tech talk. But what does that translate to? That translates to being able to create workloads that are mixed critical, meaning something that’s really highly safe where it’s driving your car. So we isolate these workloads, and we really create these combined containers where we can create an environment of mixed-criticality, and that gives that software development the safety and the reliability that we need, where we need it, and the flexibility where we may not need it as much, right. Also, this ecosystem of software. You’re not going to get all that software from one place, necessarily.
So having this in the architecture enables you to isolate those workloads and such that you can have one vendor in one container and another vendor in another. And so there’s these really kind of fundamental architectural decisions we make that enable the industry to build on top of and innovate on top of, and their base capabilities but that… and the usage of that expands. Now, you may be able to integrate what is an in-vehicle entertainment with an ADAS capability all into one piece of solution, one silicon, because those lines are getting blurry as well. And so lots of innovation happening at the architectural level that helps the industry start to see these capabilities to light. AI acceleration, right. Oftentimes we think of AI as maybe a neural network, and that’s the acceleration that’s happening. But it’s actually, there’s a lot of data processing that needs to happen. And so our CPUs sit right alongside these accelerators and we create low-power technology and as well as AI acceleration to go with it. The other thing is it’s not all just about CPU compute. It’s heterogeneous compute, which means there’s cameras, there’s a screen. And so all of these things play right in and all these innovations at Arm play right into the hands of what automakers need today.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. And multimodal AI and performance per watt in a vehicle, right.
Dipti Vachani: I didn’t get to that just yet, or Gen AI, right.
Olivier Blanchard: Yep.
Dipti Vachani: I mean, there’s a lot of really cool innovations that are happening in those areas. Multimodal is, it’s a car. It’s multimodal by definition, right.
Olivier Blanchard: Yep.
Dipti Vachani: And then also, and the fact that Gen AI makes learning maybe innovation in how we learn. Do we need all the cars on the road to gather data? Can we generate that data through some AI technique?
Olivier Blanchard: Right.
Dipti Vachani: Lots of really, really neat things to see, and what’s amazing having been the industry, I think, as long as you and I have, often the car is the last place the innovation see the innovation.
Olivier Blanchard: Yes.
Dipti Vachani: We’re now seeing it first, right.
Olivier Blanchard: Yep.
Dipti Vachani: We’re seeing it first or almost first, and that’s a great time to be on the market.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, it is. So are there any particular announcements at this year’s CES that you want to highlight or that jump out that you want to talk to me about?
Dipti Vachani: Yeah, absolutely. So if you saw Jensen’s keynote, that is Arm and NVIDIA Thor is Arm-based. Really, really excited about our partnership with NVIDIA, as well as we announced a multi-year partnership with Aston Martin.
Olivier Blanchard: Nice.
Dipti Vachani: And that is very exciting for us in the automotive space, as you can think of. I mean, the race car is the epitome of most advanced car on the road, and so we’re working very closely with them on technology across the board and their racing, as well as some of their DE&I initiatives. ne thing I noticed, having gone to some of these races, is so few females that are in that space, and pretty analogous to what I experience on a regular basis. And so, a partnership with them to help combine our forces and improve the environment for both racing and for technology.
Olivier Blanchard: Excellent. That’s cool.
Dipti Vachani: It is really cool. I’m really excited.
Olivier Blanchard: So bonus question. What are you most excited about in the next two, three years? Not even just this year, but just looking forward at the automotive industry in particular. It’s not just an Arm question.
Dipti Vachani: We often say that we’re saving lives, and it kind of seems like motherhood and apple pie, but it really is. You see stuff happening, and you see whether it’s the amount of deaths that we see with vehicles were just errors, and the fact that these ADAS capabilities are… And it’s not necessarily about fully autonomous vehicles, but the capability to check if someone’s falling asleep while they’re driving or someone is inebriated while they’re driving, whether it’s a camera on your face to be able to say, “I’m going to safely pull over” until you’re ready to drive again. These things, they’re not the cool, sexy things that everyone talks about, but they’re truly going to change getting another person home safely, right.
Olivier Blanchard: I think they’re pretty sexy. No. No.
Dipti Vachani: Thank you.
Olivier Blanchard: They’re cool. I mean, when they-
Dipti Vachani: I do think they are too.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.
Dipti Vachani: But people often talk about, “Hey, I can talk to my car.” Well, yeah, that’s cool. And I do think that’s cool, but I think what we’ve seen right now is really going to reduce the amount of tragedies we see on the road.
Olivier Blanchard: Well, I’m a cyclist, and I also ride motorcycles, so I’m very vulnerable-
Dipti Vachani: Yes.
Olivier Blanchard: … on the road. And so, for me, this particular focus is probably the most important of all the features of software-defined vehicles. So we’re very much aligned there. Dipti, thank you so much-
Dipti Vachani: Thank you for having me.
Olivier Blanchard: … for taking the time to-
Dipti Vachani: Thank you for having me.
Olivier Blanchard: … speak with me. Thanks for tuning in. So we’re Six Five On The Road at CES. I’m Olivier Blanchard, your host today. We hope that you watch other videos. Make sure that you follow us, click on all the things, and we’ll see you soon at an event near or far away from you.
Author Information
Olivier Blanchard has extensive experience managing product innovation, technology adoption, digital integration, and change management for industry leaders in the B2B, B2C, B2G sectors, and the IT channel. His passion is helping decision-makers and their organizations understand the many risks and opportunities of technology-driven disruption, and leverage innovation to build stronger, better, more competitive companies.
