Rumor: Amazon wants to develop its own processors

Amazon seems to have plans to develop its own processors. According to Gigaom, the company has hired former Calxeda engineers. A vacancy was also posted on Amazon’s site from which it can be concluded that Amazon is interested in custom CPUs.

The now-deleted vacancy was aimed at someone with ‘microprocessor design expertise’. Also, according to Gigaom, six LinkedIn profiles show that Calxeda engineers at Amazon have been given positions such as Hardware Development Engineer and Manager of Hardware Engineer. Before going bankrupt at the end of 2013, Calxeda focused on developing 64-bit ARM socs, among other things.

It is not clear what kind of processors Amazon wants to make. It is plausible, however, that the company wants to make custom chips for, for example, servers that it could use for its cloud services. Google and Facebook have been doing this for some time, Google today announced its Power8 server motherboard. Amazon declined to comment on the rumours.