Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 18
AWS Eyes $50 Billion Trainium Chip Sales as It Pushes Deeper Into Nvidia's Market
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 18

AWS Eyes $50 Billion Trainium Chip Sales as It Pushes Deeper Into Nvidia's Market

3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 18

Summary

  • $50 billion is the annual run-rate AWS says its chip business could reach if it sold Trainium chips to outside data-center operators as well as to itself.
  • Peter DeSantis said those third-party sales talks are still early, extending Andy Jassy's April signal that Amazon may eventually sell racks of its in-house AI chips.
  • Demand is the main rationale and the main constraint: Jassy said current Trainium capacity sold out almost instantly, and even Trainium4 capacity is already spoken for more than a year ahead.
  • Selling chips directly would also test AWS's current model, which earns not just from compute tokens but from attached cloud services such as storage, networking, security and monitoring.
  • Even if AWS builds a standalone chip business, it would still trail Nvidia's roughly $326 billion revenue run rate and face manufacturing bottlenecks at partners such as TSMC.

Insights

Is the AI industry trading dependency on Nvidia for lock-in to competing ecosystems from Amazon and Google?
Can Amazon's custom chips truly challenge Nvidia's dominance while facing severe supply chain bottlenecks?
As hyperscalers build their own silicon, is the era of the general-purpose AI chip coming to an end?