In another wild turn for AI chips, Meta signs a deal for millions of Amazon AI CPUs

Amazon just hit a major Meta milestone, once again, for Amazon’s native chips. Meta signed a deal to use millions of Gravity AWS Amazon on Friday announced chips to meet its growing artificial intelligence needs.

Note that AWS Graviton is an ARM-based CPU (central processing unit, the chip that handles general computing tasks) and not a GPU (graphics processing unit).

While GPUs remain the preferred chip for training large models, once these models are trained, the AI ​​agents built on top of them cause a shift in the type of chip required. Agents create compute-intensive workloads such as real-time reasoning, code writing, research, and coordination involved in managing agents through multi-step tasks. The company says the latest AWS version of Graviton is specifically designed to handle AI-related computing needs.

This deal returns more Meta money to AWS rather than competitors like Google Cloud. Last August, Meta signed a six-year, $10 billion deal with Google Cloudalthough Meta was, until then, primarily an AWS customer that also used Microsoft Azure.

We can’t help but notice that AWS timed the announcement of this deal exactly with the conclusion of the Google Cloud Next conference, like a virtual smile on its cloud rival. Naturally, Google also makes its own custom AI chips Announce new versions of them at the exhibition.

It’s true that Amazon makes its own GPU, too: Trainium, which, despite its name, is used for both training and inference — the phase that occurs after the model is trained, when it actively processes claims.

But Anthropic had already swooped in with a deal announced earlier This month you captured many of those chips For years to come. The Claude maker agreed to spend $100 billion over 10 years to run workloads on AWS — with a particular focus on Trainium — while Amazon agreed to invest another $5 billion (bringing its total investment to $13 billion) in Anthropic in return.

Ultimately, the Meta deal allows Amazon to showcase a massive AI client as a proof point for its own domestic CPUs. These are the chips that compete with Nvidia’s new Vera CPU, which is also based on ARM and designed to handle AI workloads. The difference, of course, is that Nvidia sells its chips and AI systems to enterprises and cloud providers (including AWS). AWS only sells access to its chips through its own cloud service.

Earlier this month Amazon CEO Andy Jassy He targeted Nvidia and Intel in his annual letter to shareholders, saying the companies want better price-performance ratios for AI, and he intends to win deals on that basis. It also means that the pressure couldn’t be greater on Amazon’s internal chip building team to deliver, and they do We visited last month for an exclusive tour of their lab.