The world’s largest cloud computing company, Amazon Web Services (AMZN.O) is considering deploying new artificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O), though no final decision has been made. According to Reuters.
The remarks came during an AMD event in which the chipmaker highlighted its AI approach for a market dominated by rival Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O).
Despite AMD providing certain technical details for an AI CPU due later this year that could outperform Nvidia’s best current capabilities on some criteria, the news sent shares lower after AMD failed to reveal a flagship customer for the chip.
In interviews with Reuters, AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su outlined a strategy for gaining major cloud computing customers by providing a menu of all the pieces required to build the kinds of systems needed to power services similar to ChatGPT, but allowing customers to pick and choose which ones they want, using industry standard connections.
“We’re betting that a lot of people are going to want choice, and they’re going to want the ability to customize what they need in their data center,” Su said.
While AWS has not made any public commitments to use AMD’s new MI300 chips in its cloud services, Dave Brown, vice president of elastic compute cloud at Amazon, said AWS is considering them.
“We’re still working together on where exactly that will land between AWS and AMD, but it’s something that our teams are working together on,” Brown said. “That’s where we’ve benefited from some of the work that they’ve done around the design that plugs into existing systems.”
Nvidia does sell its chips piecemeal but is also asking cloud providers if they are willing to offer an entire system designed by Nvidia in a product called DGX Cloud. Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) is Nvidia’s first partner for that system.
Brown said AWS had declined to work with Nvidia on the DGX Cloud offering.
“They approached us, we looked at the business model, and it didn’t make a lot of sense” for AWS due to the company’s long experience in building reliable servers and existing supply chain expertise, Brown said.
Brown said that AWS prefers to design its own servers from the ground up. AWS started selling Nvidia’s H100 chip in March, but as part of systems of its own design.
Reuters
