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Amazon (AMZN-0.79%) Web Services is looking to take on Nvidia’s (NVDA-3.33%) dominance in artificial intelligence chips with a new offer to AI researchers.
The cloud computing unit of Amazon said on Tuesday that researchers who want to use its custom AI chip, Trainium, can get credits worth $110 million to use its cloud data centers as part of its Build on Trainium program.
The company’s Trainium chip is used for training AI models, and is an in-house competitor to AI chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD-0.59%). Amazon is making up to 40,000 first-generation Trainium chips available for the program, which is focused on university-led research in generative AI, and counts researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Gadi Hutt, business development lead for AI chips at AWS, told Reuters that the company is taking a different strategy from Nvidia to get developers to use its chips, and is planning to publish Trainium’s instruction set architecture so customers can program the chip directly, instead of with software, which is what Nvidia’s chips need.
But despite preparations to roll out the next-generation of its in-house AI chips, Amazon “is going nowhere,” until Nvidia’s CUDA software “is no longer the control point of AI training,” and the cloud giant “iterates much faster,” Richard Windsor, founder of research firm Radio Free Mobile, said in a note.
Amazon will likely launch its in-house AI inferencing chip, Inferentia, at its re:Invent conference later this year, Windsor said, but he doubts “it will make much difference” to Nvidia’s dominance.
“We want to be absolutely the best place to run Nvidia,” Dave Brown, vice president of compute and networking services at AWS, told the Financial Times. “But at the same time we think it’s healthy to have an alternative.”
Windsor said Brown’s statement “is indicative of Nvidia’s market power, and all of its biggest customers are trying to reduce their dependence on it for training and inference and so far, they are having very little success.”
Meanwhile, Amazon is discussing another multi-billion dollar investment in AI startup, Anthropic, The Information reported. Amazon is reportedly asking Anthropic, which develops AI models rivaling those of OpenAI, to use servers powered by its in-house custom chips.