If Amazon Internet Companies has its method, the cloud big goes to push even deeper into Nvidia’s market, in what is perhaps one of many greatest challenges to Nvidia’s AI chip dominance we’ve seen to date.
Amazon’s AI chief Peter DeSantis told Bloomberg that AWS is in talks to promote its AI chip Trainium to different firms to be used in information facilities. DeSantis declined to specify which firms could possibly be the consumers of such chips.
Such talks about promoting chips are within the early phases, the corporate tells TechCrunch, and stem from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter in early April, by which he stated the corporate’s homegrown AI chips had been so coveted that he was serious about promoting them.
“If our chips enterprise was a standalone enterprise, and bought chips produced this 12 months to AWS and different third events (as different main chips firms do), our annual run fee could be ~$50 billion. There’s a lot demand for our chips that it’s fairly attainable we’ll promote racks of them to 3rd events sooner or later.”
How a lot of a problem to Nvidia might Amazon be? A $50 billion competitor wouldn’t precisely tank Nvidia — which is at present on a $326 billion income run fee — if it keeps delivering quarters like the last one. However it’s akin to Intel’s annual revenues.
AWS has to date resisted promoting its AI chips for lots of causes. The largest is that the cash AWS really makes on its chips is a waterfall impact. Certain, it costs clients instantly for the AI tokens these chips course of on its cloud, however it additionally will get to cost for a bunch of different companies firms want for his or her AI apps, together with storage, safety, networking, and monitoring companies.
Equally importantly, Amazon has touted the capability of its chips has been promoting out sooner than it could produce them. In that very same shareholder letter in April, Jassy said the present Trainium chip capability had bought out virtually immediately. So too, he stated, had the capability for the subsequent one, Trainium4, which gained’t even be obtainable for greater than a 12 months. This was earlier than AWS formally added OpenAI to the models it was serving up.
So promoting its chips to others means it could probably have to go away present clients on ready lists, except it might in some way manufacture a surplus of chips by way of its manufacturing companions similar to TSMC. However it must miraculously elbow Nvidia out of the best way to try this with TSMC, which has just lately supplanted Apple to develop into the foundry’s largest buyer.
AWS spokesperson Doron Aronson (who hosted me during a recent private tour of the AWS chip design facility) additionally confirmed that AWS could promote these chips. “Whereas we’ve traditionally declined requests to promote chips instantly, Andy famous it’s fairly attainable we’ll promote racks of them to 3rd events sooner or later.”
So whereas Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang just lately declared that he’s found a brand new $200 billion market for Nvidia in promoting CPUs for AI, not simply GPUs — thereby shifting into Intel and AMD territory — Jassy clearly has his personal chip ambitions: a $50 billion market that may put elbow extra instantly into Nvidia’s world.
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