SAN FRANCISCO, July 9 (Reuters) - The number of customers that use Arm-based chips in data centers has grown to 70,000, a 14-fold increase since 2021, the company told Reuters.

Under the guidance of Chief Executive Rene Haas, chip technology maker Arm has been working to expand its business into the PC market and has made substantial gains selling its architecture for data center chips as well.

Like other chip companies, Arm has benefitted from the frenzy around generative artificial intelligence computing and said a significant portion of its data center growth is due to AI. The company said it had seen a 12-fold spike in startups that are using Arm chips from 2021.

Arm's strong outlook arrives as the chip industry faces near term challenges. While chips related to building AI data centers have boomed, other large swaths of the semiconductor market such as PC and mobile sales have remained slow.

The company declined to provide annual financial guidance due to trade uncertainty when it released results in May.

Chips based on the Arm architecture are known for delivering high performance with low energy consumption, which is one of the reasons it powers just about every mobile phone on the planet. Such performance has been adapted by chip designs for data center processors, which typically consume substantially more energy.

The data center market earlier proved difficult for Arm to break into, but the company has more recently been aided by cloud computing giants such as Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft developing home-grown Arm chips for use in their sprawling infrastructure.

Customers often rent Arm-based chips through a cloud computing company such as Amazon's AWS.

Amazon has rolled out several generations of its data center processor (CPU) since 2018, including artificial intelligence versions, and added millions Arm-based chips to its cloud computing platform.

But SoftBank-owned Arm has made big gains in other areas as well, as it seeks to erode the computing dominance of designs from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel, based on the x86 architecture.

The group of developers worldwide working to make apps that run its tech is crucial to a chip company's success.

According to the company, Arm has roughly doubled the number of applications since 2021 running on Arm-based machines to 9 million. The developer base working with the company's computing architecture has increased by 1.5 times to 22 million since 2021.