AWS is preparing to announce an update to the Graviton4 chip line, with the highlight being network bandwidth of up to 600 gigabit per second - the level the company calls the "most premium service" on the current public cloud platform. Ali Saidi, a senior engineer at AWS, compared the speed to a machine that can read 100 music records per second.
Graviton4 is one of many chip products developed by Annapurna Labs (headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA) for Amazon. This is considered an important step forward in coaches' self-dying chip strategy, helping the company compete directly with traditional semiconductor manufacturers such as Intel and AMD.
However, the real competitor that AWS wants to overcome is Nvidia - the giant that dominates the field of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware infrastructure.
At the re:Invent 2024 conference in December 2024, AWS introduced the Rainier Project - an AI supercomputer designed specifically for the start-up company Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested $8 billion to support development. The Rainier project is powered by more than 500,000 chips - an order that would almost certainly belong to Nvidia.
According to Gadi Hutt, senior director of product engineering and customer experience at AWS, Amazon's goal is to reduce AI training costs and provide alternatives to Nvidia's expensive graphics processing units (GPUs).
Hutt admits Nvidia's Blackwell chip is more efficient than Trainium2, but coaches' chips have a superior cost advantage. Trainium3 will launch this year, with double the performance of Trainium2 and saving more than 50% of energy, Hutt said.
Rami Sinno, technical director at Annapurna Labs, said that demand for these chip lines has far exceeded its supply capabilities. We have a huge supply but every service we build has customers who use it regularly, said Rami Sinno.
With the upcoming Graviton4 upgrade and the development of the Trainium chip in the Rainier Project, Amazon is showing its ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure chain from networking, training to reasoning.
According to the coaches representative, the Graviton4 update will be announced at the end of June 2025.
