Amazon launches new AI servers, Apple joins as customer

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN ) Web Services (AWS) has announced the introduction of new data center servers equipped with its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) chips, presenting a challenge to Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA )'s dominance in the sector. Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL ). has been confirmed as a customer, planning to utilize these new Trainium2 chips. AWS's cloud unit revealed that these servers will be part of a massive supercomputer, which will incorporate hundreds of thousands of chips. This announcement was made on Tuesday.

This supercomputer, powered by AWS's Trainium2 chips, will be utilized by AI startup Anthropic as the first company to use this technology. Anthropic is known for creating reliable and interpretable AI systems and will leverage the computational power to enhance the capabilities of their AI models.

Benoit Dupin, an executive at Apple, also acknowledged that the tech giant is employing Trainium2 chips, signifying a significant adoption of AWS's new offering.

Matt Garman, AWS Chief Executive, further disclosed that the company is already working on Trainium3, the next evolution of their AI chip, which is slated to make its debut next year.

The new Amazon Elastic (NYSE:ESTC ) Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, powered by AWS Trainium2, are now generally available and introduce the Trn2 UltraServers. These UltraServers are designed to provide exceptional performance and cost efficiency for training and deploying contemporary AI models, including large language models (LLM) and foundation models (FM).

The Trn2 instances promise a 30-40% improvement in price performance over current GPU-based EC2 instances and boast 16 Trainium2 chips, delivering 20.8 peak petaflops of compute. This makes them ideal for handling AI workloads with billions of parameters.

For even more demanding AI tasks, the Trn2 UltraServers offer a new EC2 service, featuring 64 interconnected Trainium2 chips for up to 83.2 peak petaflops of compute. This setup quadruples the compute, memory, and networking capabilities of a single instance, enabling the training and deployment of the world's largest AI models.

The collaborative project between AWS and Anthropic, named Project Rainier, aims to construct an EC2 UltraCluster of Trn2 UltraServers, which will become the world's largest AI compute cluster once completed.

AWS also highlighted the upcoming Trainium3 chip, which will be manufactured using a 3-nanometer process node, promising to quadruple the performance of the current Trn2 UltraServers.

The AWS Neuron software development kit (SDK) facilitates the optimization of AI models to run on Trainium chips, supporting popular frameworks like JAX and PyTorch, and is integrated with the Hugging Face model hub, which hosts over 100,000 models.

Trn2 instances are currently available in the US East (Ohio) AWS Region, with plans to expand availability to additional regions soon. Meanwhile, the Trn2 UltraServers are being offered in a preview phase.

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Source: Investing.com