As the race with Microsoft to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI) market heats up, Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a new artificial intelligence chip for its cloud computing services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky announced Trainium2, a second-generation chip designed for training AI systems, at a conference in Las Vegas. Selipsky said the new version is four times faster and twice as energy efficient as the previous version.
AWS’s move comes weeks after Microsoft announced its own AI chip called Maia. The Trainium2 chip will also compete with Alphabet’s Google’s AI chip, which has been providing tensor processing units (TPUs) to cloud computing customers since 2018.
Selipsky said AWS will begin offering new training chips next year. The proliferation of custom chips comes amid a scramble to find computing power to develop technologies such as the large-scale language models that form the basis of ChatGPT and similar services.
Cloud computing companies are offering chips to supplement AI chip market leader Nvidia, which has been undersupplied for the past year. AWS also said Tuesday that it will offer Nvidia’s latest chips for its cloud services.
Selipsky on Tuesday announced the cloud company’s fourth custom central processor chip, Graviton4, which it said is 30 percent faster than its predecessor. This news comes a few weeks after Microsoft announced its own custom chip called Cobalt, designed to compete with Amazon’s Graviton series.
Both AWS and Microsoft are using Arm’s technology in their chips. This is part of an ongoing trend in cloud computing away from chips made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Oracle is using chips from startup Ampere Computing for its cloud services.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
Affiliate links may be generated automatically. Please see our Ethics Statement for more information.
