Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that it is in advanced negotiations to sell its Trainium artificial intelligence chips to external data centres, in a move that shakes up Nvidia’s absolute dominance in the AI accelerator market. This was revealed by Peter DeSantis, AWS’s head of artificial intelligence, in an interview with Bloomberg on 18 June 2026. The company, which currently uses these processors exclusively to power its own cloud, is now considering opening up its silicon to third parties, which could transform the global AI infrastructure landscape. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, has described this business opportunity as a potential market of $50 billion per year if the chip division operated as an independent company.
The Trainium chips, custom-designed by Annapurna Labs (an Amazon subsidiary), have demonstrated extraordinary performance. The second generation, Trainium2, offers up to a 30–40% better price-performance ratio than comparable GPU alternatives, while Trainium3 — whose first units began reaching customers in early 2026 — improves those figures even further with an additional jump of 30 to 40% over Trainium2. Demand is so overwhelming that Trainium3 is already practically sold out, with all of its production capacity committed. Amazon projects that its AI silicon revenue could grow from the current $20 billion annual run rate to $50 billion if the external sale materialises. This supply shortage reflects the investment frenzy in AI: global spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure is estimated to exceed $200 billion in 2026.
Amazon’s decision marks a turning point in the industry. Until now, the big hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) developed their own chips for internal use, but Nvidia remained the dominant supplier of the open accelerator market, with an estimated share of over 80%. If Amazon manages to position Trainium as a viable alternative for corporate data centres and sovereign cloud providers — especially in regions that require data sovereignty — it could erode Nvidia’s de facto monopoly and accelerate the diversification of the AI hardware ecosystem. As DeSantis noted, “there is so much under-consumption in AI that external sales will not cannibalise the cloud business”. The AI chip war has just entered a new phase, and Amazon has put all its chips on the table.
— Marta, for intermitente intelligence.
