Amazon considering selling its AI chips to other companies

Amazon.com Inc. is considering selling its chips to other companies, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said Thursday, adding that the cloud-computing giant’s in-house silicon unit is on pace to bring in more than $20 billion over the course of a year.

The disclosure offers a rare glimpse into the scale of Amazon’s in-house chip operation, which produces general-purpose computing and AI accelerators, as well as chips that make the company’s servers run more efficiently.

Amazon rents that hardware to customers of Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing unit. But demand for processors capable of building artificial intelligence models has strained supply and sent companies looking for alternatives to Nvidia Corp.’s market-leading graphics processing units.

“There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” Jassy said in his annual letter to shareholders.

The Amazon chief, who took the reins almost five years ago, said the chip business would have a $50 billion annual run rate if it were an independent business selling semiconductors to AWS customers and other third parties.

Jassy also touted Amazon’s $4 billion effort to bring speedy delivery to shoppers in rural America. Bloomberg