Amazon chips no longer just a side dish, they're a $20B biz
The Trainium train keeps a-rollin'
Amazon is now among the top three datacenter chip businesses in the world, as its semiconductor business surpassed a $20 billion annual run rate ... and it would be closer to $50 billion if it included itself among the customers, CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
“If our chips business was a standalone business and sold chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties as other leading chip companies do, our annual revenue run rate would be $50 billion,” Jassy said. “As best as we can tell, our custom silicon business is now one of the top three datacenter chip businesses in the world.”
Amazon's rapidly expanding custom silicon business includes its Graviton processors, Trainium AI training chips, and Nitro security chips, and is growing at over 100 percent year over year, Jassy said.
“The speed at which we've gotten here is extraordinary, and we have momentum for our custom AI silicon. We've recently shared very large, multi-year, multi-gigawatt training commitments from the two leading AI labs in the world, Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as an increasing number of companies like Uber betting on Trainium,” Jassy said. “And we now have over $225 billion in revenue commitments for Trainium.”
OpenAI committed to consuming roughly two gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS to power its frontier models, with the agreement set to ramp in 2027. Anthropic committed to securing up to five gigawatts of current and future Trainium generations to train and run its advanced AI models.
Additionally, Meta signed an agreement to deploy tens of millions of AWS Graviton cores for its agentic AI workloads, and Uber partnered with Amazon to use Graviton4 and Trainium3 across its ride and delivery platform.
“As AI systems shift from answering questions to taking actions, and as post training and inference scale up, the compute required pulls heavily on CPUs,” Jassy said. “That's why Meta chose Graviton, which delivers up to 40 percent better price performance than any other x86 processors and now used by 98 percent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers.”
But anyone hoping to buy Trainium chips now will have to wait, Jassy said.
“Our Trainium2 chip has about 30 percent better price performance than comparable GPUs and has largely sold out,” Jassy said. “Trainium3, which just started shipping at the start of 2026 and is 30 to 40 percent more price performant than Trainium2, is nearly fully subscribed, and much of Trainium4, which is still about 18 months from broad availability, has already been reserved.”
Overall, Amazon reported first-quarter revenue of $181.5 billion, up 17 percent year over year. Its cloud unit, AWS, generated $37.6 billion in revenue during the quarter, a 28 percent jump that marked its fastest growth rate in 15 quarters.
Jassy said in the first three years after AWS launched, it had a $58 million revenue run rate, while in the first three years of this AI wave, AWS' AI revenue run rate is over $15 billion - nearly 260 times larger.
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Amazon's overall net income for the quarter came in at $30.3 billion, or $2.78 per diluted share. That's up from $17.1 billion, or $1.59 per diluted share, in Q1 2025, but that number includes $16.8 billion in pre-tax gains from Amazon's investments in Anthropic, booked as non-operating income.
Amazon Bedrock, the company's managed service for accessing foundation models, processed more tokens in the first quarter than in all prior years combined, with customer spending on the platform growing 170 percent quarter over quarter, the company said. Amazon made OpenAI's GPT-5.4 model available in limited preview on Bedrock and announced that GPT-5.5 is coming soon. It also launched Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 on the platform.
The cloud giant also announced a collaboration with Cerebras to deliver what it described as the fastest AI inference speeds available for large language models through Bedrock, making AWS the only cloud provider to offer such a solution, it said.
The company also launched Bedrock AgentCore, a set of infrastructure tools for building and deploying AI agents, which Amazon said is now used to deploy an agent as frequently as every 10 seconds. ®
