Inside Amazon's quest to build an AI chip empire — and avoid a fight with Nvidia
As Amazon doubles its Australian data centre investment, Capital Brief visited the Austin lab where another key piece of its AI push is taking shape.
For much of 2024, Californian unicorn Poolside was splashing nearly $1 million a month on Nvidia chips to sit inside a facility owned by IREN, the Australian-founded data centre operator, as part of a wider effort to develop its latest foundation AI model.
But in October that money was diverted to Amazon’s bottom line after the USD3 billion startup decided it would get a better bang for its buck using “Trainium2” processors developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to Poolside co-founder Eiso Kant.
"It's very rare to see any company in the history of GPUs make such a step from one chip to the next," Kant said of the second-generation Trainium2 chip AWS launched last December. "When it comes to cost-benefit, cost-performance analysis, the Trainium chips are in an incredible position."
Poolside develops AI models specialised for enterprise-grade software coding, and last year raised USD500 million in an enormous Series B. Kant noted his company uses both Nvidia and Trainium chips but now has plans to "scale Trainium quite a bit" — despite the fact that Nvidia tipped money into that funding round.
