Arm Poaches Amazon's AI Chip Director To Advance In-House Chip Plans

Arm Holdings, the company behind the Arm architecture that powers a myriad of devices, has poached a key member of Amazon’s chip design team as the company moves towards making chips of its own. It’s part of a string of additions the company has made in the last few years that include prominent chip designers from firms such as Qualcomm and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Arm Holdings has hired Rami Sinno, who previously held the position of Intelligence Chip Director at Amazon. During his tenure at Amazon, he helped bring the Trainium and Inferentia AI processors to fruition, which are used for training and running diverse AI applications. This will be a bit of a coming home moment for Sinno, who was VP of Engineering at Arm from 2014 through 2019.


This hire shows Arm is likely getting more serious about offering its own hardware. Although it’s difficult to tell how this will be viewed by its partners, who currently pay the company fees to use its designs for their own hardware. Will the multitide of companies that offer Arm-based SoCs continue to be content to pay Arm for licensing fees when they will be in direct competition?

Arm is already a profitable company partly because it doesn’t have to worry about fabs, finding customers to purchase their chips, or contend with fluctuating tariffs. So, it seems risky for the company to jump into making its own chips. However, the thirst for AI capable hardware has brought NVIDIA vast amounts of revenue, and Arm probably figures it’s a good idea to try and capture a piece of this growing market.

Time will tell if this potential move will work out for Arm, or if ends up being a decision that pushes away its partners and leaving the company on an island.