Amazon’s Trainium2 AI Chip Already Generating Billions, CEO Andy Jassy reveals
LAS VEGAS – November 30, 2023 - Amazon’s internally developed Trainium2 AI chip is already a multibillion-dollar business, according to Amazon CEO Andy jassy, signaling early success in the company’s challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in the artificial intelligence hardware market. The announcement came during AWS re:Invent, Amazon’s annual cloud computing conference.
Amazon launched Trainium2, it’s second-generation AI chip, online in October. The chip is designed for deep learning workloads adn is a key component of Amazon’s strategy to offer competitive AI infrastructure to its cloud customers.
Amazon is a notable investor in Anthropic,and as a result,Anthropic designated AWS as its primary model training partner. However, Anthropic’s models are also now available on Microsoft’s cloud platform via Nvidia chips. OpenAI is also utilizing AWS alongside Microsoft’s cloud services, though its workloads on AWS currently run on Nvidia hardware.
Few U.S. companies possess the necessary combination of silicon chip design expertise, high-speed interconnect technology, and networking capabilities to directly compete with Nvidia. Nvidia solidified its market position in 2019 with the acquisition of Mellanox, a high-performance networking hardware maker, beating out bids from Intel and Microsoft.
A significant hurdle for competitors lies in Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA software platform, which is integral to many AI applications. Rewriting AI applications to run on non-CUDA chips presents a significant challenge.
Amazon is addressing this with its next-generation Trainium4 chip,which will be designed to work alongside Nvidia GPUs within the same system.the impact of this interoperability – whether it will erode Nvidia’s market share or simply strengthen its position within the AWS cloud - remains to be seen.
