Arm hires an Amazon AI chip expert to launch its own chip manufacturing ventures.

An important step in Arm Holdings’ drive to produce its own chips has been taken with the hiring of a top Amazon official who was instrumental in the company’s artificial intelligence chip program. Rami Sinno, the former director of AI chips at Amazon, has joined Arm to support the company’s plans to develop whole chips, according to an exclusive report. Sinno played a significant role in Amazon’s development of Trainium and Inferentia, two in-house AI processors intended to power and operate extensive AI applications.

Arm has thus far mostly refrained from developing its own processors. Rather, it has concentrated on creating instruction sets and processor architectures that other businesses, such as Apple and Nvidia, utilize as the foundation for their goods. Because of this business strategy, Arm technology is now crucial to the smartphone market and is becoming more significant in data centers, where servers built on its intellectual property are going up against established market giants Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.

However, Arm has been seeking to broaden its role in the chip business and go beyond providing intellectual property. The business announced in July that it will use some of its profits to create its own chips and parts. Rene Haas, the CEO, has also discussed the potential for creating both entire systems and chiplets, which are smaller, specialized components of a processor that may be integrated into a larger system. Sinno’s hiring is a component of this larger goal. Under his direction, Amazon’s AI chip development initiatives sought to produce processors that could rival and even outperform Nvidia’s potent graphics processors, which are the industry leaders in AI. His experience might be crucial for Arm as it looks to compete in the same market.

The new hiring show a clear direction: instead of only providing CPU blueprints, Arm wants to develop its own full designs. By selling its own chips and keeping the royalties from its licensing business, the company, which is primarily owned by SoftBank Group, would be able to profit more from the expanding semiconductor market.

Arm-based CPUs are already found in almost all smartphones worldwide, and their designs are becoming more popular in servers. It will be more difficult to enter into the AI chips market, which is presently controlled by Nvidia and is being challenged by initiatives from Amazon, Google, and other companies.