Amazon to Rival Nvidia AI Chips with 'Trainium 2' Trainium 2 is undergoing testing with other players, including Anthropic, another Amazon backed start-up
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
To reduce its reliance on chip giant Nvidia, Amazon is preparing to launch its next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) chip – Trainium 2.
In Q4 2023, Nvidia held 80 per cent of the graphics processing unit (GPU) market share.
"We want to be absolutely the best place to run Nvidia. But at the same time, we think it's healthy to have an alternative," Dave Brown, vice president of compute and networking services, AWS was quoted as saying. According to Financial Times, Amazon aims to lower operational costs for both Amazon and its AWS customers by using its own chips.
Report states that through its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the E-commerce giant is heavily investing in custom-designed chips to enhance the efficiency of its vast network of data centres. Acquired by Amazon in 2015 for USD 350 million, Israeli chip start-up Annapurna Labs is leading this innovation. The chip is expected to be unveiled next month as part of Amazon's lineup of AI chips designed for training large-scale AI models.
Trainium 2 is undergoing testing with other players, including Anthropic, another Amazon backed start-up.
Amazon notes that its "Inferentia" AI chips, designed for generating responses from AI models, are already 40 per cent cheaper to operate than comparable solutions.
The chip development comes as AWS announces offering free computing power to researchers who utilise its custom-designed AI chips. It will provide researchers with credits worth an estimated USD 110 million to access its cloud data centres and utilise "Trainium," its specialised chip for developing AI models.
