Amazon in talks to sell Trainium chips directly, targeting $50B revenue run rate
Amazon Web Services is in early-stage talks to sell its Trainium AI accelerators directly to other companies for use in third-party data centers, marking a major strategic shift. AI Chief Peter DeSantis confirmed the discussions in a recent Bloomberg interview but declined to name potential buyers. The move aims to capitalize on surging demand for alternatives to Nvidia's dominant GPUs and follows CEO Andy Jassy's April shareholder letter, in which he noted that if AWS's custom-chip business were standalone, it would have a $50 billion annual revenue run rate.
For years, Amazon kept Trainium exclusively within AWS, monetizing the chips only through cloud service margins—capturing charges for tokens, storage, networking, and other services alongside the compute itself. This vertical integration has been wildly profitable: the broader custom-silicon business (Trainium, Graviton, Nitro) crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate in Q1 2026 and is growing at triple-digit rates. Major customers like OpenAI (committed to 2 GW of capacity) and Anthropic (5 GW commitment) rely entirely on AWS infrastructure.
Selling chips externally doesn't immediately cannibalize cloud revenue, DeSantis argued, because underconsumption in AI remains acute. Amazon's Trainium3 is 'nearly fully subscribed' despite shipping only at the start of 2026; Trainium2 has already sold out. The pitch to external buyers centers on cost: Trainium delivers comparable training and inference performance to Nvidia GPUs at lower price points, a claim validated by the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Uber prefer it for their workloads.
For infrastructure buyers, this opens a genuine third option beyond Nvidia-only or cloud-captive arrangements. If Amazon executes, it moves the market from 90% Nvidia toward a duopoly (Amazon/AMD) and signals that custom silicon is now a VC-fundable business itself. Watch sign-ups from non-Nvidia-committed labs in AI and whether Amazon prices Trainium competitively or exploits margin.
Sources
- Primary source
- Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips | TechCrunch
“Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis told Bloomberg that AWS is in talks to sell its AI chip Trainium to other companies for use in data centers. Such talk about selling chips is in the early stages.”
- Amazon May Start Selling Its Custom AI Chips to Outside Companies
“Amazon's custom-chip business crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate in the first quarter of 2026 and is growing at a triple-digit pace. OpenAI has agreed to about two gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS, and Anthropic has signed on for up to five gigawatts.”