Amazon plans to use Nvidia tech in AI chips, roll out new servers

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Amazon.com's AWS cloud computing unit on Tuesday said it will adopt key Nvidia technology in future generations of its artificial intelligence computing chips as the firm ramps up efforts to attract major AI customers to use its services. 

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, said it will adopt a technology called "NVLink Fusion" in a future chip known as Trainium4. It did not specify a release date. The NVLink technology creates speedy connections between different kinds of chips and is one of Nvidia's crown jewels. 

The companies made the announcement as part of AWS's annual week-long cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, which draws about 60,000 people. 

Nvidia has been pushing to sign up other chip firms to adopt its NVLink technology, with Intel, Qualcomm and now AWS on board. 

The technology will help AWS build bigger AI servers that can recognize and communicate with one another faster, a critical factor in training large AI models, in which thousands of machines must be strung together. As part of the Nvidia partnership, customers will have access to what AWS is calling AI Factories, exclusive AI infrastructure inside their own data centers for greater speed and readiness. 

"Together, Nvidia and AWS are creating the compute fabric for the AI industrial revolution - bringing advanced AI to every company, in every country, and accelerating the world's path to intelligence," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.

Separately, Amazon said it is rolling out new servers based on a chip called Trainium3. The new servers, available on Tuesday, each contain 144 chips and have more than four times the computing power of AWS's previous generation of AI, while using 40% less power, Dave Brown, vice president of AWS compute and machine learning services, told Reuters. 

Brown did not give absolute figures on power or performance, but said AWS aims to compete with rivals - including Nvidia - based on price. 

"We've got to prove to them that we have a product that gives them the performance that they need and get a right price point so they get that price-performance benefit," Brown said. 

"That means that they can say, 'Hey, yeah, that's the chip I want to go and use.'" 

The company also introduced on Tuesday new versions of its AI models known as Nova. Amazon said Nova 2 is faster and more responsive and includes a version called Nova that can respond with images or text-to-text, image, speech or video prompts. 

Another called Sonic can respond to speech prompts with speech outputs, which AWS CEO Matt Garman called "human-like" in his keynote address. 

Amazon has struggled to gain broad acceptance of Nova against rivals like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. Still, Amazon posted a 20% sales boost in AWS in its most recent quarter, primarily due to its cloud computing and AI infrastructure services. 

At the AWS Las Vegas conference, Amazon also introduced a service called Nova Forge to help companies create their own AI models using data they input. "This allows you to produce a model that deeply understands your information, all without forgetting the core information that the thing has been trained on," said Garman. 

Amazon shares were up 0.9% at $235.98 at midday on Tuesday.