Exclusive: Amazon’s Cloud Unit Considering AMD’s New AI Chips

SAN FRANCISCO, June 14 (Reuters) – Amazon Web Services ( AMZN.O ), the world’s biggest cloud computing provider, is considering using new artificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc ( AMD.O ). The decision, an AWS executive told Reuters.

The comments came during an AMD event where the chip company outlined its strategy for the AI ​​market dominated by rival Nvidia Corp ( NVDA.O ).

AMD shares rose about 1% following the news. They closed 3.6% lower on Tuesday after AMD disappointed investors by not disclosing a primary customer for its AI chip, expected later this year.

In interviews with Reuters, AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su outlined an approach to winning over major cloud computing customers by offering a menu of all the pieces needed to build systems for power services like ChatGPT. Industry standard connections should be used.

“We’re betting that a lot of people will like choice, and they’ll like the ability to customize what they need in their data center,” Su said.

While AWS hasn’t 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 exactly where we’ll land between AWS and AMD, but it’s something our teams are working on together,” Brown said. “We’ve benefited from some of the work they’ve done around design that plugs into existing systems.”

Nvidia sells its chips piecemeal, but asks cloud providers if they’re 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 the system.

Brown said AWS declined to work with Nvidia on the DGX cloud offering.

“They approached us and we looked at the business model and it didn’t make a lot of sense,” Brown said, because of the company’s long experience in building reliable servers and its existing supply chain expertise.

AWS wants to design its own servers from the ground up, Brown said.

AWS began selling Nvidia’s H100 chip in March, but as part of its own design.

“The fact that Amazon is considering AMD’s MI300 is a sign of interest among tech companies to diversify their AI development hardware,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jacob Bourne. “This could create new opportunities for other chipmakers.”

Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Akash Sriram in Bangalore; Editing by Kim Coghill and Anil de Silva

Our Standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.