Amazon considers selling its Trainium AI chips to other data centers

In short: Amazon Web Services says it is in early talks to sell its Trainium AI chips to other companies for use in their data centers.

What happened

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is discussing whether it should sell its in-house AI chips called Trainium to other businesses, according to comments from Amazon AI chief Peter DeSantis. A data center is a building full of computers that power online services.

Until now, Amazon has mainly used Trainium inside AWS to run AI systems for its own cloud customers. Think of these chips like special engines built for AI work, and they help process the huge amount of calculations needed to train and run AI models.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised the idea in his annual shareholder letter in April. He wrote that if Amazon sold the chips it is producing this year to AWS and to outside buyers, that chip business could have an annual run rate of about $50 billion. AWS told TechCrunch that the talks are at an early stage, and it did not name potential buyers.

Why it matters

Nvidia is the best-known seller of AI chips today, and many companies rely on it to build and run AI tools. If Amazon starts selling Trainium more widely, it could give big data center operators another option, which may affect prices and supply over time.

There is also a practical hurdle. Jassy has said Trainium capacity has been selling out quickly, including the next version, Trainium4, which is not expected to be available for more than a year. That means Amazon may need to make more chips before it can reliably sell them outside AWS.

Source: TechCrunch AI