Amazon poaches senior veteran from Google TPU to be responsible for the software development of Trainium chip

Sina Finance
2026.07.29 09:36

Amazon officially hired Robert Hunter, a distinguished engineer from Google and the head of software for the first generation of TPU. He will be responsible for the development of the Neuron software system for Amazon's Trainium chips, competing with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem, and assisting in the establishment of a quantum computing technology roadmap. This move aims to strengthen Amazon's research and development capabilities in the AI chip software field

Robert Hunter, who previously led the software development for Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips, will focus on developing software for running AI models on Amazon's Trainium chips after joining Amazon.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that Robert Hunter, a distinguished engineer at Google and the initial software lead for TPU chips, has officially joined Amazon's chip team, also at the level of distinguished engineer.

The spokesperson stated that Hunter reports to Amazon's Senior Vice President Peter DeSantis and will initially be core responsible for the Amazon Neuron software system. This set of tools allows developers to deploy and run various AI models on Amazon's self-developed AI training and inference chip, Trainium, competing with NVIDIA's widely used CUDA software ecosystem.

During his twenty years at Google, Hunter was primarily responsible for optimizing machine learning models, ensuring algorithms ran efficiently on Google TPU (for AI training and inference) as well as third-party GPU and CPU hardware. He played a leading role in creating XLA (Accelerated Linear Algebra Compiler), a software tool launched by Google in 2017, which serves as the foundational work for adapting to the aforementioned hardware.

Three months ago, Amazon recruited another former Google employee, Steve Molloy, as Vice President of AI Chips. Molloy had developed custom chips for Google's Pixel series phones and tablets; Hunter's joining further strengthens Amazon's chip software capabilities.

The Amazon spokesperson added that in the long term, Hunter will also allocate some of his efforts to assist the company in building an overall technology roadmap for quantum computing

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