Amazon Web Services Discusses Possible Sales of Trainium Chips to Other Companies

Amazon Web Services is in talks to sell its Trainium AI chips to other companies for use in data centers, Amazon AI chief Peter DeSantis told Bloomberg. DeSantis declined to name potential buyers. The discussions remain in early stages, according to AWS.

The talks follow Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter released in early April. In that letter Jassy wrote that if the chips business operated as a standalone company selling chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties, the annual run rate would be roughly $50 billion.

Jassy also stated there is so much demand for Amazon’s chips that it is quite possible the company will sell racks of them to third parties in the future.

Current Trainium capacity sold out almost instantly, he added, and capacity for Trainium4 has also sold out with availability more than a year away. Nvidia currently operates on a $326 billion revenue run rate. Intel’s annual revenues are comparable to a $50 billion competitor.

AWS spokesperson Doron Aronson confirmed the possibility of future sales. “While we’ve historically declined requests to sell chips directly, Andy noted it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” Aronson said. AWS has previously kept Trainium chips inside its own cloud, where it earns revenue from both chip usage and additional services such as storage, security, networking, and monitoring.

Selling chips externally would require manufacturing capacity beyond current customer demand.