Amazon’s cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide free computing power to researchers who want to use its custom artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Reuters news agency gave this news on Tuesday. The move is generally seen as a declaration of war on market leader Nvidia and other competitors.
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Facebook and Instagram: Meta lowers the prices of ad-free subscriptions by 4 and 5 eurosAccording to Reuters report AWS will provide a total of $110 million in credits to use its cloud data centers to researchers who want to use Amazon’s own Tranium chips to train their AI models. The company plans to provide 40,000 first-generation Trenium chips for the program, which involves researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California at Berkeley.
Competitive market for AI chips
Gadi Hut, who leads business development for AI chips at AWS, said AWS hopes to use this strategy to draw attention for its own AI chips. The program aims to level the playing field against Nvidia’s chips, as well as those from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Alphabet’s cloud division.
According to Reuters, to program Nvidia’s chips, most AI developers use CUDA, Nvidia’s flagship software, rather than programming the chip directly. AWS instead plans to release the instruction set architecture for the most basic parts of its chips, allowing customers to program the chips directly. According to Hutt, this approach is aimed at attracting larger customers who want to make small changes. “Think about the people using the infrastructure and investing hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, in rented computing power,” Hutt explained. “They will take advantage of every opportunity to increase performance and reduce costs.”
Another billion dollar investment in Anthropic
Amazon is also planning another billion-dollar deal with AI start-up Anthropic – and is trying to outdo Nvidia there too. In September 2023, Amazon agreed to cooperate with Anthropic and announced at the time that it wanted to invest up to four billion US dollars. The agreement includes AWS becoming the primary cloud provider for Anthropic.
According to the report, the condition for the second billion-dollar investment is that Anthropic be using Amazon’s Trenium chips instead of the previously favored Nvidia chips to train its AI models. According to people familiar with the matter, the size of the investment will directly depend on how many Amazon chips Anthropic is willing to deploy.
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