When it comes to electrical chips dedicated to generative AI, Nvidia seems unstoppable. The Californian company has literally exploded since the launch of ChatGPT and its rivals, so much so that it is now the most valuable company in the world. For its part, Amazon has much more modest ambitions in this activity, even if it hopes to free itself from its dependence on the company led by Jensen Huang. Explanations.
Amazon is not a new entrant to the market
15 years ago now, the American company launched into coud computing via Amazon Web Services. To support this very profitable activity, the Tech giant quickly had to build an infrastructure worthy of the name in order to run its servers. So James Hamilton, senior vice president and engineer, took matters into his own hands and eventually convinced his boss to make his own microchips.
In particular, he teamed up with the Israeli startup Annapurna (which Amazon ended up buying) to create a versatile processor based on Arm called Graviton. The latter were also less expensive than those from Intel.
Building on its momentum, the company decided to produce chips specifically intended to operate AI technologies. This is the case with Inferentia, which was notably deployed in December 2019 in the company’s data centers to respond to requests from users of the Alexa assistant.
Subsequently, Trainium1 was born. The latter is dedicated to helping companies train machine learning models. Far from resting on its laurels, Amazon does not intend to miss the train of generative AI.
Bloomberg visited a neighborhood in Austin, Texas, where engineers from the group are working hard to create Trainium2, the new chip that could make a difference in the field of AI. Our colleagues note that there is a start-up atmosphere in these premises. An atmosphere that is surprising within a company as established as Amazon.
Without going so far as to dislodge Nvidia from its leadership position, the company hopes that this third generation will allow it to manage a large part of its AI work internally and meet the demand from AWS enterprise customers who have projects around this technology.
Anthropic, the trump card?
Its partnership with Anthropic, the company that develops the Claude AI, should also count a lot in this perspective. Amazon has just reinjected $4 billion into the startup.
Tom Brown, IT director of Anthropic, was full of praise for this exchange: “We are particularly impressed by the price/performance ratio of the Amazon Trainium chips. We have gradually expanded their use to a wider and wider range of workloads. »
