Amazon unveils new AI chip for training AI

Amazon has recently unveiled its brand new AI chip that will be used for the company's cloud computing service. Named Trainium2, the second-generation chip is designed for training AI systems and is said to be four times faster and twice as energy efficient as its previous model.

The chip was revealed to the public on November 28 at a conference in Las Vegas by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Chief Executive Adam Selipsky. There, Selipsky said that AWS will start offering the new training chips next year.

The AWS move comes weeks after Microsoft announced its own AI chip called Maia. The Trainium2 chip will also compete against AI chips from Alphabet's Google, which has offered its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) to its cloud computing customers since 2018.

The proliferation of custom chips comes amid a scramble to find the computing power to develop technologies such as large language models that form the basis of services similar to ChatGPT.

The cloud computing firms are offering their chips as a complement to Nvidia, the market leader in AI chips whose products have been in short supply for the past year. AWS also said that it will offer Nvidia's newest chips on its cloud service.

Selipsky also announced Graviton4, the cloud firm's fourth custom central processor chip, which it said is 30% faster than its predecessor. The news comes weeks after Microsoft announced its custom chip called Cobalt designed to compete with Amazon's Graviton series.

Both AWS and Microsoft are using technology from Arm Ltd. in their chips, part of an ongoing trend away from chips made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in cloud computing. Oracle is using chips from startup Ampere Computing for its cloud service.