Andy Jassy Praised Amazon’s Chips; Criticized NVIDIA with a Rare Swipe

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a rare swipe at NVIDIA by emphasizing his confidence in Amazon’s chips.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Andy Jassy virtually challenged NVIDIA by praising Amazon’s progress in the field of artificial intelligence chips. Amazon is a customer of NVIDIA; however, it also produces artificial intelligence chips called “Trainium.” The company has made chip deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Apple by selling access to Trainium chips via the cloud.

“We Have a Strong Partnership with NVIDIA”

Jassy stated that Amazon’s chip business is “on fire.” He said this demand is part of a shift in which companies are diversifying where they buy their artificial intelligence chips from. Andy Jassy said, “Virtually all AI thus far has been done on NVIDIA chips, but a new shift has started. We have a strong partnership with NVIDIA, will always have customers who choose to run NVIDIA, and we will continue to make AWS the best place to run NVIDIA.”

“Trainium3 Offers 30–40% Better Price-Performance Than the Previous Model”

Jassy said that customers want “better price-performance.” He compared this to Amazon reducing Intel’s dominance in the CPU space with its own chip called Graviton, which it launched in 2018. Saying, “The same story arc is unfolding in AI,” Jassy stated that Amazon’s latest chip, Trainium3, offers “30–40% better price-performance” than the previous model. Jassy noted that the annual revenue run rate of Amazon’s chip business is now over $20 billion. Jassy wrote, “At scale, we expect Trainium will save us tens of billions of capex dollars per year, and provide several hundred basis points of operating margin advantage versus relying on others’ chips for inference.”