Nov 13, 2024 16:00:00

What is 'Annapurna Labs,' which is developing its own AI chips to reduce Amazon's reliance on NVIDIA?

In the suburbs of Austin, Texas, there is an office district that houses Annapurna Labs, a microelectronics specialist company acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon has released photos of what Annapurna Labs is doing.

Take a look inside the lab where AWS makes custom chips

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/take-a-look-inside-the-lab-where-aws-makes-custom-chips

Amazon steps up effort to build AI chips that can rival Nvidia
https://www.ft.com/content/3d9b5c6d-f1ae-4f6f-adc3-51e5f1dfb008

Annapurna Labs is a semiconductor company that designs and manufactures silicon for AWS. AWS has its own family of custom chips and accelerators, and each new generation improves on the previous one. These chips are designed and manufactured by Annapurna Labs, which operates from multiple locations, including a lab in Austin, Texas, as well as Tel Aviv, Israel, and Toronto, Canada.

Annapurna Labs' products include SoCs for machine learning acceleration and accelerators that improve the overall performance of computers. 'Our guiding principle is to accelerate the production of silicon products by integrating all silicon development in-house, rather than relying on other companies,' said Rami Shinno, director of silicon engineering.

AWS supports AI processing on its own network, and Dave Brown, vice president of networking services, said, 'We want to be the best place to process NVIDIA chips,' and is trying to grab a share of advanced AI. On the other hand, Brown said, 'It's healthier to have alternatives,' and he has high hopes for the company's specialized AI chips. According to Amazon, AWS's machine learning chip 'Inferentia' is 40% cheaper to operate than existing products, and the economic newspaper Financial Times points out that 'AWS is trying to compete with NVIDIA.'

Annapurna Labs is developing a range of other products, including a way to build virtual servers based on the

Graviton3 processor, which offers 25% more computational power than traditional processors and consumes up to 60% less energy than comparable instances.

Below is a 'mini data center' for testing new equipment.

An employee holding a wafer.

'What Annapurna Labs lacks in distinctive features, it more than makes up for in the work it does to push the boundaries,' Amazon said. 'Our team of specialized engineers, computer scientists, operations and logistics experts are constantly rethinking the design of computer hardware, from how to optimize processing performance to how to protect the components of large, complex devices during transportation and installation.'