Amazon is planning to compete in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) race with other tech majors like Microsoft and Google. The e-commerce giant is reportedly developing two types of microchips for training and accelerating generative AI. As Nvidia GPUs get expensive and difficult to procure, these custom chips — Inferentia and Trainium from Amazon will help AWS customers with an alternative platform to train their large language models.

What Amazon said about these chips
In an interview with CNBC, Amazon Web ServicesCEO Adam Selipsky said, “The entire world would like more chips for doing generative AI, whether that’s GPUs or whether that’s Amazon’s own chips that we’re designing.

I think that we’re in a better position than anybody else on Earth to supply the capacity that our customers collectively are going to want.”
Compared to Google and Microsoft, Amazon was late to enter the AI race. In April, Amazon announced its own family of large language models, called Titan. The company also launched a service called Bedrock to help developers improve software using generative AI.
How these chips will Amazon in the AI race
As per the report, Amazon’s custom silicon is expected to give it an edge in generative AI. Amazon VP of product Matt Wood has also explained how both these chips will work.
Wood said, “Machine learning breaks down into these two different stages. So you train the machine learning models and then you run inference against those trained models. Trainium provides about 50% improvement in terms of price performance relative to any other way of training machine learning models on AWS.”

Meanwhile, Inferentia will enable customers “to deliver very, very low-cost, high-throughput, low-latency, machine learning inference, which is all the predictions of when you type in a prompt into your generative AI model, that’s where all that gets processed to give you the response, ” Wood added.
Amazon’s cloud dominance can also push users to choose the generative AI offered by the company over Google and Microsoft. AWS customers may be drawn to Amazon as they’re already familiar with it, running other apps and storing their data there.
Bedrock offers AWS customers to access large language models made by Anthropic, Stability AI, AI21 Labs and Amazon’s own Titan. In July, Amazon rolled out its latest AI offering, AWS HealthScribe which helps doctors to draft patient visit summaries using generative AI.