Arm CEO: AI will help humans cure cancer, but first we must solve the chip shortage.

动察 Beating AI Flash: Arm CEO Rene Haas believes healthcare will become AI's "killer app." In a BBC interview, he predicted that AI will help cure cancer within our lifetime and dramatically shorten the time required for new drug discovery and testing.

Haas's assessment is that humans currently struggle to fully simulate cells, the human body, and cancer's impact on DNA. As data and computing power continue to grow, AI has the opportunity to tackle these overly complex problems.

But for now, the bottleneck is chips. Haas said AI companies are building multiple gigawatt-scale data centers, and demand for chips and memory has already exceeded existing supply capacity. Building a new chip factory typically costs tens of billions of dollars and takes two to three years, making it difficult to close the gap in the short term.

However, cancer researchers are less optimistic about "throwing computing power" at the problem. Professor Chris Bakal of the Institute of Cancer Research in London said his team trains AI directly on patient samples and doesn't need massive data centers. What may truly matter for medical AI isn't who has the biggest computer, but who has access to better patient data.