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Arm Holdings Hires Amazon AI Exec to Boost Chip Design Ambitions
18 Aug
Summary
- Arm hires Amazon's AI chip director Rami Sinno
- Arm plans to invest in building its own chips and components
- Arm seeks to expand beyond just chip designs to complete systems
In a significant move, Arm Holdings has hired Rami Sinno, the artificial intelligence chip director at Amazon, to strengthen its ambitions to develop its own complete chips. This comes as Arm, which is majority-owned by SoftBank, seeks to expand beyond its traditional role of designing chip architectures and instruction sets that it licenses to customers.
Sinno was responsible for helping to develop Amazon's homegrown AI chips called Trainium and Inferentia, which are designed to power large-scale AI applications. His hiring is part of Arm's broader plan to invest a portion of its profits into building its own chips and other components, rather than just licensing its technology to others.
Arm has also brought on executives from HPE and Intel/Qualcomm to bolster its teams focused on building complete chip designs and systems. This shift represents a strategic move by Arm to gain more control over the end-to-end chip development process, rather than solely relying on its customers to turn its intellectual property into finished products.
The company's CEO, Rene Haas, has discussed the possibility of Arm moving beyond just chip designs and into building its own chiplets—smaller, function-specific versions of a chip that can be stitched together—as well as complete systems. This effort is aimed at increasing Arm's business and reducing its reliance on royalty payments from customers who use its technology.
