- At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in London on Wednesday, Ampere CEO Renée James praised Amazon’s “outstanding team” dedicated to chipmaking. “They have a really unique way of accelerating data inside their own network,” James said.
Renée James, the CEO of the semiconductor designer Ampere, lauded Amazon’s efforts to make its own chips.
The tech giant, James said, had a team that has been together for a long time, which she says is critical for success in the complex and competitive semiconductor business.
“Amazon uniquely has an outstanding team that they’ve had together for years,” James said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in London on Wednesday. “One of the hallmarks of successful semiconductors is, how many generations has a team done together? And the answer at Amazon is a lot.”
Over the last several years, Amazon has been developing its own suite of AI chips. That effort is part of a strategy to offer Amazon’s customers its own hardware to go along with its cloud computing services. Amazon previously had a non-AI chip called Graviton. It now also has two AI chips called Trainium and Inferentia, which specialize (as the names suggest) in training models and in delivering predictions for already trained ones, respectively.
In February, Amazon pushed further into the frontiers of chip design when it announced its first quantum-computing chip, dubbed Ocelot.
Amazon’s development team and its scale as a company put it in a good position, according to James.
“They have a really unique way of accelerating data inside their own network,” James said. “And they have an outstanding silicon team that’s been able to build really great products for their own use. I think given their might, and their team, they’ll continue to be very successful with that strategy.”
The new chips Amazon is developing are intended to rival those of the industry’s biggest players such as Nvidia and Intel. James began her long career in the semiconductor business at Intel, where she worked for almost 30 years, eventually serving as the company’s president.
In 2017, she founded Ampere—an ambitious move considering the technical expertise and capital investment needed to enter the semiconductor business. James said she saw an opportunity to design new kinds of chips because of the rise of cloud computing.
“We knew that the way that the cloud used software was different than the way the enterprise consumed software, [which was] in this linear scaling, always on, always on demand [way] and the microprocessors that we had built were meant to turn on and off to be efficient for different workloads, but not for the cloud?” James explained. “So that was our thesis.”
Ampere launched with initial investments from Oracle and the Carlyle Group, which James said “doesn’t usually do venture.” In March, Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group announced it would purchase Ampere for $6.5 billion. Ampere is expected to play some role in the recently announced Project Stargate initiative to build data centers across the country.
