Amazon has just presented Trainium 2, its new chip dedicated to AI acceleration. The stakes are colossal, if the power is there, Apple could ask Amazon for help in training Apple Intelligence.
Apple x Amazon: an AI collaboration
In recent years, Amazon has developed two families of chips specifically designed for its cloud computing and machine learning needs: Trainium And Graviton. This Tuesday, December 3, 2024, during a new conference AWS re:InventAmazon revealed Trainium 2.
Trainium 2 is an AI acceleration chip developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for deep learning and generative model training. This chip offers four times the performance of Trainium 1 and improves the performance/price ratio by 30%. It can connect up to 100,000 chips together and has 96 GB of HBM memory, which is ideal for training large language models (LLM).
What if Trainium 2 was able to improve Apple Intelligence?
Speaking of Large Language Models (LLM), it appears that Apple has a strong interest in chips developed by Amazon. Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, was on stage in Las Vegas. The opportunity to recall that Apple has used AWS technology for more than a decade in services such as Maps, Apple Music and Siri.
With the arrival of Trainium 2, Apple is seeking to evaluate whether Amazon’s new chip is powerful enough to train its Apple Intelligence system. If Amazon’s infrastructure obtains a significant power gain thanks to this new generation of chips, the partnership between the two giants could take on a new dimension, now including Apple’s AI.
It is important to remember that competition is intense with Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia, which had a historic year in 2024 thanks to its AI infrastructures. Nvidia’s GPU chips have found immense success in language model training (LLM) and other applications requiring machine learning.
