The effort follows comments from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who recently highlighted growing demand for the company’s internally developed AI processors. In his annual shareholder letter, Jassy said Amazon’s chip business could reach a significant scale if it supplied both AWS and external customers.
“If our chips business was a standalone business, and sold chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties (as other leading chips companies do), our annual run rate would be ~$50 billion. There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future.”
AWS has historically kept its AI chips within its cloud ecosystem, where they support a broader range of services used by companies building and running AI applications. Beyond computing power, AWS also provides related infrastructure such as storage, networking, security and monitoring services.
Another factor has been demand. According to Jassy, available capacity for the current generation of Trainium chips was quickly absorbed, and capacity for the next-generation Trainium4 has also already been committed despite not being scheduled for availability for more than a year.
AWS spokesperson Doron Aronson said the company has previously declined requests to sell chips directly but acknowledged that the possibility remains under consideration.
Any expansion into direct chip sales would place Amazon more directly into competition with established AI hardware providers. The discussions signal that AWS is evaluating whether its custom AI processors can become a business beyond the cloud services where they were originally deployed.
This analysis is based on reporting from The Economic Times.
Image courtesy of The Verge.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
