Amazon launched its new Trainium3 AI chip and broader model upgrades, and a veteran executive departed for OpenAI.
- Amazon rolled out its new Trainium3 AI chip and began deploying it across data centers.
- The company introduced upgraded Nova models and new customization tools.
- A senior Amazon executive left to join OpenAI as head of global business development.
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) shares rose nearly 2% on Tuesday after the company’s cloud division introduced Trainium3, the newest version of its in-house artificial intelligence accelerator, positioning the chip as a lower-cost, high-performance alternative to hardware offered by Nvidia and Google.
Amazon said Trainium3 is now live in a limited number of data centers and will begin rolling out to customers immediately.
AWS Vice President Dave Brown said the rapid deployment is central to Amazon’s strategy to stand out in the AI infrastructure race. “As we get into early next year we’ll start to scale out very, very quickly,” Brown said, according to a Bloomberg report.
Amazon Pushes To Regain Ground In AI Computing
The Trainium line is Amazon’s attempt to counter balance-of-power shifts in the AI ecosystem. AWS remains the world’s largest provider of rented computing power, but developers building frontier AI systems have increasingly favored platforms tied to Microsoft and OpenAI or Google’s Gemini, leaving Amazon working to close the gap, the report said.
Amazon claims Trainium3 can train AI models more cheaply and efficiently than Nvidia’s graphics processors, which dominate the market. “We’ve been very pleased with our ability to get the right price performance with Trainium,” Brown told Bloomberg.
The company is releasing Trainium3 roughly a year after introducing its predecessor, marking a fast turnaround in the chip industry and one intended to match Nvidia’s promise to release new chips annually, according to the report.
Software Ecosystem Still An Obstacle
Despite the push, Amazon faces a significant hurdle as Trainium lacks the extensive software libraries that make Nvidia’s systems easy for developers to adopt.
Many of the Trainium chips currently running are dedicated to Anthropic, the AI developer backed by Amazon. AWS has built deployments of more than 500,000 chips to help train Anthropic’s newest models and plans to reach 1 million chips dedicated to the company by year-end, Bloomberg noted.
New AI Models And Tools Debut Alongside The Chip
Amazon also rolled out new versions of its Nova AI model family at its annual re:Invent conference. The upgraded Nova 2 lineup includes Omni, a multimodal variant capable of taking text, images, speech, or video as input and responding with text or images, the report said.
Rohit Prasad, who leads much of Amazon’s AI model development and its Artificial General Intelligence team, expects Nova 2 to be competitive. A new tool, Nova Forge, will allow customers, including Reddit, which is already using it, to customize in-training versions of Amazon’s models with their own data to build domain-specific systems.
Senior Amazon Executive Departs For OpenAI
In a separate development, Torben Severson, chief of staff to Amazon’s retail chief Doug Herrington and a 17-year veteran of the company, revealed he has left to join OpenAI as its Vice President and Head of Global Business Development.
In a lengthy LinkedIn post, Severson said “joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” He reflected on nearly two decades at Amazon, where he helped build corporate business development, shaped major partnerships, and served as technical adviser to Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.
Stocktwits Users Express Frustration Over Stock Move
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for Amazon was ‘bullish’ amid ‘low’ message volume.
One user said the stock’s weakness was “shocking,” noting strong retail sales, reaccelerating AWS, solid marketing, and new cost-efficient chips, yet the shares “still can’t move.”
Another user echoed the comment, saying “so even chip news couldnt move this.”
Amazon’s stock has risen 7% so far in 2025.
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