Arm Hires Amazon's AI Chip Director to Boost In-House Chip Development

Arm Holdings, a prominent player in the global chip architecture sector, has reportedly hired Rami Sinno, the former AI chip director at Amazon, to join its in-house chip development initiative. Sinno, who previously oversaw the development of Amazon's proprietary AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia, is expected to bring his expertise to Arm's efforts in creating its own complete chip solutions.

Arm, traditionally known for designing core architectures and instruction sets that it licenses to clients, has not ventured into manufacturing its own chips. Companies like Apple and Nvidia have utilized Arm's technology to design their own chips, generating revenue for Arm through licensing fees. Arm's architecture is prevalent in nearly all smartphones globally and has made significant inroads into the data center market, traditionally dominated by Intel and AMD.

In July, Arm announced plans to allocate a portion of its profits towards manufacturing its own chips and other components. CEO Rene Haas indicated that the company is exploring opportunities beyond its traditional design business, aiming to develop smaller, function-specific, and modular chips that can be combined to form complete system solutions. This strategic shift is seen as a pivotal move for Arm to expand its business scope.

According to previous reports, Arm had outlined its plans in a sealed court document from December last year and began recruiting high-level executives from competitors in February. Over the past few years, the company has been bolstering its capabilities in complete chip and system design, hiring executives from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, and Qualcomm, including Nicolas Dube and Steve Halter.

Sinno's addition to the team is viewed as a significant move by Arm to strengthen its position in the AI chip market. Amazon's self-developed chips are designed to offer cost-effective AI computing solutions that rival Nvidia's GPUs. This experience is expected to aid Arm in developing more competitive specialized chip products.