Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing platform, announced Tuesday plans for an AI supercomputer called the “Ultracluster.” Made up of hundreds of thousands of in-house Trainium chips and a new server, the enormous AI supercomputer is Amazon’s newest project, according to The Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) exclusive report.
Titled Project Rainier, the chip cluster is the latest effort by the retail juggernaut’s AI chip design lab in Austin, Texas. The AI supercomputer, which is to be ready by 2025, will be touted as one of the largest in the world for training AI models, according to Dave Brown, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of compute and networking services.
“Ultracluster” will be used by AI startup Anthropic, which received an additional $4 billion funding from AWS in November, bringing Amazon’s total investment in the tech startup to $8 billion and establishing AWS as Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.”
Considered as OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic was founded by former research executives at OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Anthropic, which built the Claude generative AI software, made its feature available early to AWS customers that lets them fine-tune their own data in Claude.
On Dec. 3, AWS also announced a new server called “Ultraserver,” made up of 64 of its own interconnected chips, at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. At the same time, the cloud computing firm also announced Apple as one of its chip customers.
Both announcements highlight AWS’s push for Trainium, the custom-designed silicon the company is positioning as a viable alternative to chip giant Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs).
“Today, there’s really only one choice on the GPU side, and it’s just Nvidia,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services. “We think that customers would appreciate having multiple choices.”
President and CEO of Amazon Andy Jassy also claimed that the Tranium chips have 30% to 40% better price performance than the current GPU instances, calling them a “game changer.”