Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips

亚马逊希望通过销售自研 AI 芯片，更直接地挑战英伟达

If Amazon Web Services has its way, the cloud giant is going to push even deeper into Nvidia’s market, in what might be one of the biggest challenges to Nvidia’s AI chip dominance we’ve seen so far. 如果亚马逊云科技（AWS）如愿以偿，这家云巨头将进一步深入英伟达的市场，这可能是我们迄今为止见过的对英伟达 AI 芯片主导地位最大的挑战之一。

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. DeSantis declined to specify which companies could be the buyers of such chips. 亚马逊 AI 负责人 Peter DeSantis 向彭博社透露，AWS 正在商讨将其 AI 芯片 Trainium 出售给其他公司，用于数据中心。DeSantis 拒绝透露哪些公司可能是这些芯片的买家。

Such talks about selling chips are in the early stages, the company tells TechCrunch, and stem from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter in early April, in which he said the company’s homegrown AI chips were so coveted that he was thinking about selling them. 亚马逊向 TechCrunch 表示，关于销售芯片的谈判尚处于早期阶段，这源于亚马逊首席执行官 Andy Jassy 在 4 月初发布的年度股东信。他在信中提到，公司自研的 AI 芯片非常抢手，以至于他正在考虑将其对外出售。

“If our chips business was a standalone business, and sold chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties (as other leading chips companies do), our annual run rate would be ~$50 billion. There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future.” “如果我们的芯片业务是一个独立业务，并将今年生产的芯片出售给 AWS 和其他第三方（正如其他领先的芯片公司所做的那样），我们的年化营收规模将达到约 500 亿美元。市场对我们芯片的需求非常大，未来我们很有可能会向第三方出售整机柜的芯片。”

How much of a challenge to Nvidia could Amazon be? A $50 billion competitor wouldn’t exactly tank Nvidia — which is currently on a $326 billion revenue run rate — if it keeps delivering quarters like the last one. But it’s akin to Intel’s annual revenues. 亚马逊会对英伟达构成多大的挑战？如果英伟达能保持上一季度的表现，一个 500 亿美元规模的竞争对手并不会击垮目前年化营收达 3260 亿美元的英伟达。但这相当于英特尔的年收入规模。

AWS has so far resisted selling its AI chips for a lot of reasons. The biggest is that the money AWS actually makes on its chips is a waterfall effect. Sure, it charges customers directly for the AI tokens those chips process on its cloud, but it also gets to charge for a host of other services companies need for their AI apps, including storage, security, networking, and monitoring services. AWS 迄今为止一直拒绝出售其 AI 芯片，原因有很多。最主要的原因是 AWS 从芯片中获得的收益具有“瀑布效应”。当然，它会直接向客户收取其云端芯片处理 AI Token 的费用，但它还能从公司开发 AI 应用所需的其他一系列服务中获利，包括存储、安全、网络和监控服务。

Equally importantly, Amazon has touted the capacity of its chips has been selling out faster than it can produce them. In that same shareholder letter in April, Jassy said the current Trainium chip capacity had sold out almost instantly. So too, he said, had the capacity for the next one, Trainium4, which won’t even be available for more than a year. 同样重要的是，亚马逊一直宣称其芯片产能的售罄速度快于生产速度。在 4 月份的那封股东信中，Jassy 表示，目前的 Trainium 芯片产能几乎瞬间售罄。他说，下一代产品 Trainium4 的产能也是如此，尽管该产品一年多以后才会上市。

This was before AWS formally added OpenAI to the models it was serving up. So selling its chips to others means it would likely have to leave current customers on waiting lists, unless it could somehow manufacture a surplus of chips through its manufacturing partners such as TSMC. 这还是在 AWS 正式将 OpenAI 加入其服务模型之前的情况。因此，向他人出售芯片意味着它很可能不得不让现有客户排队等待，除非它能通过台积电等制造合作伙伴生产出过剩的芯片。

But it would have to miraculously elbow Nvidia out of the way to do that with TSMC, which has recently supplanted Apple to become the foundry’s largest customer. 但要做到这一点，它必须奇迹般地从台积电那里挤掉英伟达，而英伟达最近刚刚取代苹果，成为了台积电最大的客户。

AWS spokesperson Doron Aronson (who hosted me during a recent private tour of the AWS chip design facility) also confirmed that AWS may sell these chips. “While we’ve historically declined requests to sell chips directly, Andy noted it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future.” AWS 发言人 Doron Aronson（在最近一次参观 AWS 芯片设计设施时曾接待过我）也证实 AWS 可能会出售这些芯片。“虽然我们过去一直拒绝直接销售芯片的请求，但 Andy 指出，未来我们很有可能向第三方出售整机柜的芯片。”

So while Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently declared that he’s found a brand new $200 billion market for Nvidia in selling CPUs for AI, not just GPUs — thereby moving into Intel and AMD territory — Jassy clearly has his own chip ambitions: a $50 billion market that would put elbow more directly into Nvidia’s world. 因此，尽管英伟达创始人兼首席执行官黄仁勋最近宣布，他为英伟达发现了一个价值 2000 亿美元的全新市场——即销售用于 AI 的 CPU 而不仅仅是 GPU，从而进入了英特尔和 AMD 的领地——但 Jassy 显然也有自己的芯片雄心：一个价值 500 亿美元的市场，这将使亚马逊更直接地切入英伟达的领域。