Arm has hired Amazon’s AI chip director, Rami Sinno, as the company pushes forward with its plans to build its own chips.

Sinno previously worked at Arm between 2014 and 2019, when he left to join Amazon. During his first stint at Arm, he held roles as director of engineering systems and software, and then VP of engineering.

The news of his rejoining the company was first reported by Reuters. It is not clear when Sinno will begin his new role or what his job title will be.

While at Amazon, Sinno oversaw the development of the company’s in-house Trainium and Inferentia chips. Trainium chips are purpose-built for high-performance ML training applications in the cloud, while Inferentia is a dedicated inference chip designed to help customers run AI applications.

Arm CEO Rene Haas confirmed the company was looking to develop its own chips during its Q1 2026 earnings call at the end of July, a move which marks a departure from Arm’s traditional business model of designing and then licensing out its chip IP to companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.

In comments that seemed to confirm reports from earlier this year, Haas told analysts on the call that Arm was “continuing to explore the possibility of moving beyond our current platform into additional compute to subsystems, chiplets, and potentially full end solutions.”

He added that the company had accelerated its investment in R&D to “ensure that these opportunities are executed successfully,” adding that owners SoftBank had expanded its IP licensing and design services agreements with Arm, and that Arm was working with the Japanese conglomerate to help them build towards its “greater, broader AI vision.”

According to Arm, the number of customers using Arm-based chips in data centers has increased 14x since 2021, while its data center customers have reached 70,000, with the company having also seen a 12x increase in the number of startups using Arm chips during the same period.