To understand why Arm just delivered a record quarter and doubled its AGI CPU demand in six weeks, you have to step back from the chip layer and look at the scaling — as explored in the emerging fifth paradigm of scaling — curve we are actually on.

It is three stacked regimes, each moving the bottleneck to a different layer of silicon. We are now firmly inside the third regime, and the third regime is where the CPU comes back from the dead.

The frame in one line: pretraining scaling exhausted itself, inference-time scaling absorbed the slack, and agentic scaling is now the dominant axis. Each regime expanded total compute — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — consumption.

Each redistributed what kind of compute is consumed. The first two regimes fed NVIDIA. The third regime feeds Arm — not at NVIDIA’s expense, but on top of it.