Uber is the latest winner with Amazon AI chips

Tuesday, Amazon he announced that Uber was expanding its AWS cloud services partnership to use some of its Amazon chip distribution. Uber will notably expand its use of AWS’s Graviton (a low-power, ARM-based CPU) and begin testing the new Trainium3, AWS’s Nvidia competitor AI chip.

The deal is less of a long-term threat to Nvidia than Amazon’s nose-butt at cloud competitors AWS, Google and Oracle.

While Uber has historically run its own data center, in 2023, the ride-hailing company signed a multi-year cloud contract. Computers deal with Oracle and Google. The idea was to move most of its IT infrastructure out of its data centers and into the two clouds, it said.

Even in December, Uber publicly reiterated that goal, writing blog post:

In February 2023, Uber began the transition from the data center to the cloud using OCI and Google Cloud Platform, facing the two challenges of changing the main operation and introducing Arm-powered computing to the former x86 environment.

Uber specifically called out in this post the use of ARM chips made by Ampere in the Oracle cloud. This is where things get interesting.

If you’re looking for a way to break down how mixed-up Silicon Valley can be, look at Ampere’s profile.

Ampere was founded by former Intel executive Renee James after he was promoted to CEO at the chipmaker. He pulled all the strings, including his then-current career as an investor at the Carlyle investment firm and his chair at Oracle, to fund the company’s startup. Oracle owned a third of the company, and James stepped down as an independent director of Oracle for the investment.

(James was, by the way, the head of the board who helped vote on Oracle’s $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite in 2016, the company where Larry Ellison was the main bank. That agreement it led to a lawsuit against the unsuccessful shareholders (saying that Oracle paid a lot of money.)

In December, Ampere’s main competitor SoftBank acquired, and Oracle sold its stock. worth $2.7 billion tax benefit. James left Oracle’s board at the end of 2024 and is no longer working at Ampere.

Oracle is raising funds as quickly as possible for building data centers for OpenAI and Stargate. Ellison said Oracle sold Ampere because he believed that making chips in-house in his data center was no longer a competitive advantage. It prefers to buy chips and has signed major deals with Nvidia.

It is worth noting that Oracle, SoftBank, and Nvidia are also part of OpenAI’s. circular motions who are supposed to fund the development of data center models.

But now AWS is announcing that it has secured a major deal from one of Oracle’s customers, Uber, because it has in-house chips.

Uber joins Anthropic, OpenAI, and Apple as Big Tech companies that have signed on or expanded their use of AWS for AI chips. In December, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Trainium was already a multi-billion dollar business.

(For look at the team and lab that makes these chips(see our site for visiting this site.)