Amazon is in talks to sell its custom-made artificial intelligence chips for use in other companies’ data centers, a key expansion of its efforts to cut into Nvidia Corp.’s dominance.

Peter DeSantis, Amazon’s AI chief, said the world’s largest cloud computing company has begun discussions but declined to name potential customers.

“We view AI infrastructure as rapidly evolving,” he said in an interview in Paris. “And we’re constantly looking at ways to get to more customers.”


Amazon shares gained as much as 1.8% on Thursday, reaching an intraday high of $241.82 on the news.

Introduced in 2020, Amazon’s AI accelerator, Trainium, has won a few marquee buyers, including OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Uber Technologies Inc., which access the hardware via Amazon Web Services. The chip has produced more than $225 billion in revenue commitments, Amazon said in April.

That same month, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy wrote in his shareholder letter that it’s “quite possible” Amazon would sell racks of its chips to third parties. It was part of a broader attempt to reposition the sprawling company around AI, an area where it’s seen as falling behind rivals.

Amazon and other cloud computing titans have each been developing their own alternatives to Nvidia’s popular graphics processing units — and ramped up these efforts after ChatGPT’s arrival.

While the AI boom has generated soaring cloud sales, it’s also fueled a new crop of specialized AI cloud providers and driven demand for “sovereign” services in Europe and other regions that are subject to local laws and usually locate information and data processing in the host country.

In April, Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google will begin to deliver its Nvidia GPU rival chips, called tensor processing units, to a “select group of customers” for use in their own data centers.

Amazon is following suit with Trainium, in part, due to the growing demand outside of the US for computing resources that are controlled locally, according to DeSantis.

Some of that push, particularly in Europe, has prompted calls for countries to lessen their reliance on US technology or drop it altogether. Speaking at the VivaTech conference in France, DeSantis said the AWS business has not been impacted at all by this trend.

The third version of the Trainium chip, which began shipping earlier this year, is “largely sold out,” he said. Amazon said there’s already strong interest in a fourth version that’s expected to debut next year.

DeSantis dismissed the idea that selling Trainium outside of AWS would eat into the company’s cloud business. “There’s so much underconsumption in AI,” he said. “I’m not worried about it.”

The executive also cited growth for Amazon’s Graviton chips, a general-purpose processor that it recently began providing to Meta Platforms Inc. Over the last three years, DeSantis said Amazon has added more Graviton chips to its computing systems than any other type of chip.