Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit said it will adopt key Nvidia technology in future generations of its artificial intelligence computing chips. AWS, or Amazon Web Services said it will adopt a technology called “NVLink Fusion” in a future chip known as Trainium4. The NVLink technology creates speedy connections between different kinds of chips, and is considered especially important for Nvidia.
The companies made this announcement during AWS’s annual week-long cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, which draws about 60,000 people. Nvidia has also been pushing other companies like Intel, and Qualcomm to adopt its NVLink technology.
AWS will be able to use the technology to build bigger AI servers that can recognize and communicate with one another faster, a critical factor in training large AI models, which involve thousands of machines connected together. The partnership with Nvidia will give customers access to what AWS is calling AI Factories, exclusive AI infrastructure inside their own data centers for greater speed and readiness.
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“Together, Nvidia and AWS are creating the compute fabric for the AI industrial revolution – bringing advanced AI to every company, in every country, and accelerating the world’s path to intelligence,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.
Amazon is also separately rolling out new servers based on a chip called Trainium3. The new servers, available on Tuesday, each contain 144 chips and have more than four times the computing power of AWS’s previous generation of AI, while using 40 per cent less power, Dave Brown, vice-president of AWS compute and machine learning services, told Reuters. While Brown did not give absolute figures on power or performances, he said AWS aims to compete with rivals, including Nvidia, based on price.
“We’ve got to prove to them that we have a product that gives them the performance that they need and get a right price point so they get that price-performance benefit,” Brown said. “That means that they can say, ‘Hey, yeah, that’s the chip I want to go and use.”
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Amazon also introduced on Tuesday a new version of Nova, its AI models. Amazon said Nova 2 is faster and more responsive and includes a version called Nova that can respond with images or text-to-text, image, speech or video prompts.
Meanwhile, Nvidia, which is currently the most valuable company, recently took a stake in chip designer Synopsys. This was part of an expanded multi-year tie-up to jointly develop new tools for designing products across industries using its AI technology. According to Reuters, this deal is about shifting the work of several high-tech industries that are just starting to adopt AI away from central processing units used in the past and toward the graphics processing unit chips sold by Nvidia.