ARM Holdings has hired the former director of Amazon’s artificial intelligence chip operation, Rami Sinno, as it pushes ahead with plans to develop its own AI chips, Reuters reported.
Sinno helped develop Amazon’s in-house chips, Trainium and Inferentia, that the e-commerce firm created to run large-scale AI workloads.
The news service said ARM has also in recent times hired Nicolas Dube, an executive from HP Enterprise with experience in designing large-scale systems, and Steve Halter, a chip engineer formerly of Intel and Qualcomm, as part of its chip effort.
Chip plans
ARM is best known for designing low-power chip architectures that are used in complete chips created by companies including Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm.
Its architecture powers most smartphones, forms the basis of Apple’s in-house desktop chips that it began rolling out in 2020, and has begun making inroads into server chips.
To date ARM has not made complete chips of its own, but in July said it planned to invest a portion of its profits into building in-house chips and other components.
In February the Financial Times reported that ARM planned to launch its own chip this year after securing Meta Platforms as one of its first customers, following remarks in May of last year by Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of ARM’s owner SoftBank, who said the British chip designer was developing its own AI chips.
ARM’s chip is expected to be a server CPU designed for large data centres and to be built on a base that can then be customised for clients including Meta, reports have said.
Production is reportedly planned to be outsourced to a manufacturer such as Taiwan’s TSMC.
The shift is a major change to ARM’s business model, potentially giving it a cut of the massive AI chip business, but also putting it into direct competition with some of its biggest customers.
AI expansion
The move is part of SoftBank’s broader push into AI, which also includes its participation in the Stargate project that plans to invest billions in US-based AI data centre infrastructure.
Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn, the main assembler of Apple’s iPhones, said on Monday that it had sold a former electric vehicle plant in Ohio to SoftBank and would use it to manufacture data centre-related equipment for the Stargate project.
SoftBank in March acquired Ampere Computing Holdings for about $6.5 billion (£4.8bn) an Oracle-backed chip designer of ARM-based chips for servers, in a deal reported to be central to ARM’s own chipmaking project.
ARM has risen sharply in value to about $140bn since it listed on the Nasdaq in 2023, largely due to heightened interest in AI.
The company’s partnerships with Nvidia and Amazon have driven its rapid growth in data centres that power AI tools from OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic.
Meta is the latest company to turn to ARM-based server chips in a market that has long been dominated by Intel and AMD.
