Amazon has begun negotiations to sell its NVIDIA-competing AI chip 'Trainium' to other companies, moving from AWS-exclusive use to other data centers.
It has been revealed that Amazon has begun discussions with potential customers to sell its self-developed AI chip, 'AWS Trainium,' to other companies' data centers.
Amazon in Talks to Sell AI Chips Competing With Nvidia to Other Companies - Bloomberg
Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/amazon-hopes-to-challenge-nvidia-more-directly-by-selling-its-ai-chips/
Amazon Stock: Can Selling AI Chips Turn Shares Around? - Barron's
https://www.barrons.com/articles/amazon-stock-price-sell-ai-chips-nvidia-e1714e7b
Behind the scenes, when chat AI answers questions in seconds or generative AI creates images and videos, massive calculations are being performed, and securing the necessary AI semiconductors for these calculations significantly impacts service performance and operating costs. NVIDIA GPUs are widely used for AI semiconductors, but the surge in demand has made procurement costs and power consumption major challenges. As cloud providers and AI companies seek alternatives to NVIDIA, Amazon has developed its own chip, Trainium, specifically designed for AI processing.
Amazon announces new 3nm AI chip 'Trainium3,' 4 times faster than 'Trainium2' and up to 50% lower cost, with 'Trainium4' also teased - GIGAZINE
Trainium is an AI accelerator that can be used for both 'training,' which involves teaching AI models large amounts of data, and 'inference,' which involves the trained model generating answers or images. Amazon explains that by designing it specifically for AI processing rather than using a general-purpose GPU, it can reduce the cost per unit of processing power and improve power efficiency.
Trainium is only available within Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, and users don't purchase chips; instead, they rent computing power for the time they need through services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). By limiting Trainium to AWS, Amazon can generate revenue not only from the usage fees for computing but also from peripheral services such as storage, communication, security, and monitoring.
However, with the rapidly expanding demand for AI infrastructure, Amazon has changed its strategy and begun discussions to sell to other companies. Peter DeSantis, who heads Amazon's AI division, told Bloomberg that they are in discussions to sell Trainium, which is used in other companies' data centers, although he did not reveal who they are negotiating with.
Amazon has indicated that its future external sales model involves selling multiple Trainium instances, servers, and communication equipment in rack units. If this external sales model becomes a reality, purchasing companies will not only be able to entrust their processing to AWS, but will also be able to install Trainium in their own data centers and operate their own AI infrastructure.
For the Trainium series, which may be targeted for external sales, the supply allocation for the Trainium3, which began shipping in early 2026, is almost full. Reservations for the next-generation Trainium4 have also been placed before its official release, and TechCrunch points out that expanding production capacity will be necessary to maintain supply to existing customers while also pursuing external sales.
In a letter to shareholders published in April 2026, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained that the company's semiconductor business, including Trainium and the Graviton server CPU, had exceeded $20 billion (approximately 3.2 trillion yen) in annual revenue. He estimated that if the semiconductor division were treated as an independent business and the chips produced in 2026 were sold to AWS and external companies, the annual revenue would reach approximately $50 billion (approximately 8 trillion yen).
Actual selling prices, suppliers, and availability dates have not yet been revealed. Amazon has described the discussions as being in the early stages, and CEO Jassy has only stated that 'there is a possibility of selling racks equipped with Trainium to external companies in the future.'
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