Amazon in talks to sell Trainium AI chips to third parties

Amazon is in discussions to sell its custom artificial intelligence chips to other companies for use in their own data centers, a strategic move that would position the cloud giant as a direct competitor to Nvidia in the lucrative AI hardware market. The company's AI chief, Peter DeSantis, confirmed the talks are underway but did not identify potential customers.

The initiative centers on Amazon's Trainium family of AI accelerators, which are designed to train large AI models. Introduced in 2020, Trainium chips have already attracted high-profile customers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Uber, who access them through Amazon Web Services. According to the company, the chip has generated over $225 billion in revenue commitments.

The potential shift was signaled by CEO Andy Jassy in his annual shareholder letter in April. Jassy noted that demand for Amazon's custom silicon, which includes Trainium, Graviton server processors, and Nitro networking hardware, has grown so strong that selling complete server racks to third parties is "quite possible." He disclosed that the in-house chip division has surpassed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate and is expanding at triple-digit...