Arm China's Ex-Co-CEO Came Home to Singapore to Build AI Chips for Agents

Singapore's AI story has mostly been a software story — chatbots, copilots, policy frameworks — while the silicon underneath gets designed somewhere else. A homecoming chip executive is trying to redraw that map. Ken Phua, who spent 25 years abroad building other people's business models, most recently as co-CEO of Arm China, has come home to build his own: an AI silicon company called Acrab.

In an interview with DIGITIMES published on Aug 15, Phua laid out the bet behind his return. Acrab, founded in 2024 and headquartered in Singapore, is building hardware for agentic AI — the category of systems that reason and act autonomously rather than just generate text. The company's first silicon, the GELIX 1, is an edge system-on-chip designed to run large language models at the 100-billion-parameter scale locally, paired with an "Agent Box" device that orchestrates on-device agents with persistent memory and multimodal input.

Phua's move is part of a quiet shift in the semiconductor industry: experienced executives leaving multinational roles to build independent ventures in their home regions. Arm's architecture underpins most of the world's mobile chips, and a quarter-century inside that ecosystem gives Phua both design credibility and hard-won insight into how the industry's competitive dynamics work. He is betting that demand for specialised AI silicon now outstrips what mainstream vendors offer — and that a Singapore-based startup can carve out the agentic niche before the incumbents fully pivot.

The timing is notable. Acrab emerged from stealth in June with over US$350 million in cumulative funding, and closed a US$130 million Series B led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India and Vertex Growth in early August, pushing its war chest past US$480 million. The company expects revenue this year, citing industrial deployments across multiple domains. That trajectory — from stealth to revenue expectations in under a year, in hardware no less — is unusual for an industry where tape-outs alone can take years.

Why it matters for Singapore: Phua is one of the rare chip leaders who chose Singapore over Silicon Valley or China to build from scratch, and Acrab is one of the few locally headquartered companies designing AI silicon end-to-end. If GELIX-powered devices find industrial buyers, Singapore gains a homegrown reference point in the edge AI supply chain — a useful hedge for an economy building its AI reputation mostly on talent, policy and data centres. The coming quarters will show whether the founder who spent a career building for others can build something durable for his own country.