Amazon racing to develop AI chips cheaper, faster than Nvidia’s, executives say | U.S. & World [Video]

By Max A. Cherney

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Inside Amazon.com‘s chip lab in Austin, Texas, half a dozen engineers on a Friday afternoon put a closely guarded new server design through its paces.

The server was packed with Amazon’s artificial intelligence chips that compete with those from market leader Nvidia, Amazon executive Rami Sinno said on Friday, during a visit to the lab.

Amazon is developing its own processors to limit its reliance on costly Nvidia chips – the so-called Nvidia tax – that power some of the artificial intelligence cloud business at its Amazon Web Services, the main growth driver.

Through its homegrown chips, Amazon wants to help customers compute complex calculations and process enormous amounts of data more cheaply.

Its rivals Microsoft and Alphabet are doing the same.

Sinno, the director of engineering for Amazon’s Annapurna Labs that is a part of its cloud business AWS, said Amazon’s customers were increasingly demanding cheaper alternatives to Nvidia.

Amazon …