Amazon: Free computing power for AI researchers

Amazon's cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) will offer free computing power to researchers who want to use its customized chips for artificial intelligence (AI). This was reported on Tuesday by the news agency Reuters. The move is generally seen as a challenge to market leader Nvidia and other competitors.

According to the Reuters report, AWS will offer researchers who want to use Amazon's own Trainium chips to train their AI models credits worth a total of 110 million US dollars for the use of its cloud data centers. The company plans to provide 40,000 first-generation Trainium chips for the program, in which researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California at Berkeley are participating.

Competitive market for AI chips

AWS hopes to use this strategy to attract attention to its own AI chips, said Gadi Hutt, who heads business development for AI chips at AWS. The program is also intended to gain ground on chips from Nvidia, but also Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Alphabet's cloud division.

According to Reuters, most AI developers use CUDA, Nvidia's flagship software, to program Nvidia's chips instead of programming the chip directly. Instead, AWS plans to release the so-called instruction set architecture for the most basic part of its chip so that customers can program the chip directly. According to Hutt, this approach is primarily intended to attract large customers who want to make small changes. "Think about people who are using infrastructure and investing hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, in leased computing power," Hutt explained. "They would take every opportunity to increase performance and reduce costs."

Further billion-dollar investment in Anthropic

Amazon is also planning another billion-euro deal with the AI start-up Anthropic – and is also trying to outdo Nvidia there. In September 2023, Amazon agreed a cooperation with Anthropic and announced at the time that it intended to invest up to four billion US dollars. The agreement includes AWS becoming the primary cloud provider for Anthropic.

The condition for the second billion-dollar investment is reportedly that Anthropic will increasingly use Amazon's Trainium chips to train its AI models instead of the previously preferred Nvidia chips. According to people familiar with the matter, the amount of the investment will depend directly on how many Amazon chips Anthropic is willing to use.

(akn)