Amazon explores direct sales of Trainium AI chips to data‑center customers

Amazon Web Services is holding early discussions about selling its custom Trainium AI accelerators directly to enterprises for use in their own data‑centers, moving beyond the current model of offering the chips only through the AWS cloud. AWS AI chief Peter DeSantis confirmed the talks while senior Amazon executives, including CEO Andy Jassy, have signaled the potential of a standalone chip business that could generate about $50 billion in annual revenue if fully realized. The company’s chip revenue already exceeds a $20 billion run rate and is growing at triple‑digit percentages.

Direct sales would allow customers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Uber to install Trainium hardware on premises, but could also reduce the ancillary cloud services revenue AWS currently earns from workloads running on the chips. Trainium 2 capacity is fully subscribed, Trainium 3 is expected to be committed by mid‑2026 and Trainium 4 is slated for 2027. Amazon remains a smaller chip vendor compared with Nvidia, whose latest quarter recorded $81.6 billion in revenue. Following the news, Amazon’s stock rose roughly 3%.

The move reflects Amazon’s broader strategy to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware by leveraging its own silicon portfolio, which includes Graviton processors and a growing ecosystem of in‑house accelerators.