By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, March 19 (Reuters) - Nvidia will sell 1 million of its graphics processing unit chips, along with a host of the AI giant's other offerings, to Amazon.com's cloud computing unit by 2027, a Nvidia executive told Reuters on Thursday.
Nvidia and Amazon Web Services said this week that AWS had reached a deal to buy its 1 million GPUs but had not disclosed the precise timing of the deal. Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at Nvidia, told
Reuters on Thursday that the sales would start this year and extend through 2027.
That is the same time frame through which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company sees an overall sales opportunity of $1 trillion for its Rubin and Blackwell families of chips.
Nvidia and Amazon did not disclose the financial terms of their deal. But Buck told Reuters the transaction contains a broad mix of Nvidia chips beyond the 1 million GPUs, including Nvidia's Spectrum networking chips and the Groq chips that Nvidia released this week after its $17 billion licensing deal with an AI chip startup late last year.
In particular, AWS plans to use a combination of Nvidia's Groq chips, along with six others from Nvidia, for more efficient inference, the name for the process by which AI systems generate answers and carry out tasks on behalf of users.
"Inference is hard. It's wickedly hard," Buck told Reuters. "To be the best at inference, it is not a one chip pony. We actually use all seven chips."
The deal also includes putting Nvidia's Connect X and Spectrum X networking gear in AWS data centers. That move is significant because AWS data centers use custom networking equipment that AWS has spent years perfecting.
"They're still going to do that, of course," Buck said. "But we are collaborating now on deploying Connect X and Spectrum X for those important workloads and biggest customers across AI with AWS."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by David Gregorio)
