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’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.”
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.”
