Arm Holdings, a well-established semiconductor company, has made a significant move to achieve its goal of producing its own chips. The company has hired Rami Sinno, Amazon’s AI chip director. Sinno played a key role in the development of Trainium and Inferentia chips designed for AI applications at Amazon.

Arm begins developing its own chip

Until now, Arm has been designing the architecture and instruction sets for processors, rather than producing its own chips, and licensing these designs to customers like Apple and Nvidia. However, CEO Rene Haas previously announced that they intend to move beyond this business model and produce their own processors and chiplets. The company also announced that it will allocate a portion of its revenue to this area to achieve this goal.

Arm’s new strategy also carries some risks. By producing its own chips, the company will be in direct competition with existing customers like Nvidia and Apple.

However, Arm’s moves in this area are not limited to Sinno. The company has previously acquired system designer Nicolas Dube from HP and chip engineer Steve Halter from Intel and Qualcomm. These transfers demonstrate Arm’s serious approach to its own chip production goal.

This radical change by Arm comes on the heels of Japanese tech giant SoftBank’s $2 billion investment in Intel in recent months. This investment is being interpreted as a move that could shift the balance of power in the sector and intensify competition.

Arm’s decision to produce its own chips and the high-level transfers it has made in this direction, when considered alongside SoftBank’s move, signal the beginning of a major transformation in the semiconductor market.