A new inner tracker based on a cylindrical gas electron-multiplier detector is under development to replace the current inner drift chamber of the BES III spectrometer. The BES III experiment is carried out at the BEPC II e + e - collider in Beijing at center-of-mass energies in the tau-charm region with a design luminosity of 1.0 x 10 33 cm -2 s -1 . The new inner tracker consists of three cylindrical layers of triple GEM surrounding the interaction point, covering 93% of solid angle. To fulfill physics requirements, a spatial resolution of 130 μm must be achieved. Both planar and cylindrical prototypes have been built and tested. A custom ASIC using UMC 110-nm technology has been designed to provide charge and time measurements—the first prototype is in testing. Notable and innovative aspects of the new inner tracker and the performance of the detector prototypes and readout ASIC are reported here.