Andy Jassy • President and CEO at Amazon 7h •
Several years ago, when we started pursuing building our own chips, a lot of folks thought this was nuts. We heard a lot of the same refrains you often hear—why make this investment, why invest in a team and all the other fixed costs to develop your own chip when you can buy from other suppliers? And, while we knew we’d partner with those other companies for the foreseeable future, if your customers are telling you they’re thirsty for better price-performance, and you’re driven by what makes customers’ lives better and easier every day, you explore options to make it so.
We realized pretty quickly that designing our own chips was going to be the best path to delivering this value for customers. We were lucky to find and join forces with the amazing Annapurna Labs team, who started with a chip (named Nitro) that offloaded security, networking, and some other virtualization functions from our servers so customers could use more of the server than they could before. Then, that team built a generalized CPU chip, Graviton, which has been very popular and impactful for customers, before embarking on building custom AI chips—Trainium (for training) and Inferentia (for inference)—which are also off to a strong start.
Am very excited about our most recent chip releases at AWS re:Invent: Graviton4 and Trainium2. Graviton4 marks the fourth generation we’ve delivered in just five years (you can see the evolution from left to right in the image below), and it’s the most powerful and energy efficient multipurpose chip we have built to date. And with the surge of interest in generative AI, Trainium2 will help customers train their ML models faster, at a more advantaged price-performance. I’m really proud of the pace of innovation our teams are delivering on and what it is making possible for customers!
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