Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business unit, announced it will provide free computing resources to researchers interested in using its Trainium AI chips, in a bid to compete with Nvidia’s dominance in AI chip technology.
AWS will offer $110 million in cloud credits, allowing researchers to access its data centers and utilize up to 40,000 Trainium chips, as part of a program involving Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley.
While Nvidia’s chips are typically programmed with its proprietary Cuda software, AWS is taking a different approach, Reuters news report said. It will allow developers to directly program its chips by releasing documentation on the chips’ instruction set architecture.
AWS’s Gadi Hutt suggests this flexibility could attract large-scale customers by enabling fine-tuning that might yield significant cost savings and performance improvements. This move underscores AWS’s commitment to retaining its cloud leadership amid rising competition from Microsoft and other providers in the AI space.
