Amazon Web Services (AWS) is exploring plans to sell Trainium, its in-house artificial intelligence chips, a move that could position the cloud giant as a more direct competitor to Nvidia in the booming AI infrastructure market. AWS Senior Vice President Peter
DeSantis discussed the development in an interview with Bloomberg, saying the company is in discussions to offer its Trainium AI chips to external customers for use in data centres.
AWS spokesperson Doron Aronson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is open to selling chips in the future. While AWS has historically declined requests for direct chip sales, Aronson said the possibility remains under consideration.
Selling chips directly would place Amazon more squarely in competition with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the backbone of the generative AI boom. Nvidia currently operates at a much larger scale, with an annual revenue run rate exceeding $300 billion. Still, a potential $50 billion chip business would make Amazon a major player in the sector.
While the discussions remain at an early stage and Amazon has not disclosed potential buyers, the move signals growing confidence in its custom silicon strategy.
However, the idea aligns with comments made by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy earlier this year.
In his annual shareholder letter published in April, Jassy highlighted the strong demand for Amazon’s custom AI chips and suggested the company could eventually sell them directly to third parties.
Jassy noted that if Amazon’s chip business operated as a standalone company and sold chips both to AWS and external customers, it could generate an annual revenue run rate of around $50 billion. He added that demand has been so high that selling racks of AI chips to outside organisations is a realistic possibility.
The move would represent a significant shift for AWS. Until now, the company has primarily used Trainium processors to power AI workloads on its own cloud platform. AWS benefits not only from charging customers for AI computing but also from selling complementary cloud services such as storage, networking, security, and monitoring.
The challenge for Amazon is supply. Demand for Trainium chips has reportedly outpaced production capacity.
In the same shareholder letter in April, Jassy said the available capacity for current-generation Trainium chips sold out quickly, and demand for the upcoming Trainium4 processors has already exceeded available supply even before launch.
That creates a dilemma for AWS. Selling chips externally could reduce availability for existing cloud customers unless Amazon significantly expands manufacturing output. The company relies on manufacturing partners such as TSMC, which is also a key supplier for Nvidia and other major technology firms.
The move comes at a time when competition in AI hardware is intensifying. Nvidia recently expanded its ambitions beyond GPUs into AI-focused CPUs, increasing pressure on rivals including Intel and AMD.
If Amazon proceeds with chip sales, it could create a new battleground in the AI infrastructure race, turning AWS from a major cloud customer into a direct challenger to Nvidia’s hardware dominance.
For now, Amazon has not committed to a timeline or specific product offering, but its willingness to explore external sales suggests that Trainium could soon become more than just an AWS-exclusive technology.