There is a growing interest in building servers with low-power chips as companies look to cut energy costs. For example, SeaMicro currently offers the power-efficient SM10000 server, which packs 512 Intel Atom netbook processors on miniature motherboards the size of credit cards. AMD has also said it may consider putting its upcoming low-power chips in servers.

Though low-power servers are being increasingly implemented in data centers, organizations may not readily shift architectures, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

Companies place the weight of their businesses on IT infrastructures and are hesitant to migrate entrenched server installments unless they find the new architecture reliable, McCarron said. Beyond reliability, Arm also needs to support a wide range of applications to find adopters.

"Any time you have a new product in a category, it takes a while to ramp," McCarron said.

Arm in September announced the Cortex-A15 processor, which was designed to handle server-type operations. The processor includes virtualization capabilities, supports up to 1TB of physical memory and can scale performance with the help of more cores. However, no official chip based on the processor has been announced yet.