Amazon's custom chips business grows triple digits as Trainium demand surges
Amazon's chips business continues to grow at triple-digit percentages year over year, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company's third quarter earnings call. Revenue commitments for both Graviton and Trainium have each risen more than 20x from a year earlier, according to Amazon.
- Amazon's chips business is growing triple-digit percentages year over year, according to CEO Andy Jassy.
- Revenue commitments for Graviton and Trainium have each risen more than 20x year over year.
- Customers using Amazon's custom silicon saved more than $2 billion in Q3 alone.
- Amazon intends to make Trainium available outside AWS late in 2027.
- AWS grew 39.3% year over year, and inference is well over half of its AI revenue.
Graviton and Trainium commitments up more than 20x
Jassy said the chips business, which includes the Graviton CPU and the Trainium AI chip, keeps expanding at triple-digit percentages year over year. Revenue commitments for Graviton and Trainium have each increased more than 20x year over year, according to Amazon.
Jassy also pointed to customer savings. Customers using Amazon's custom silicon saved more than $2 billion in Q3 alone, the company said. Amazon also open-sourced TorchNeuron, which it says lets developers run existing PyTorch code on Trainium without rewriting it. Jassy noted that most developers already use PyTorch.
Why AI is a tailwind for Graviton
Graviton is a CPU, not an AI accelerator, but Jassy said AI still drives its demand. In his explanation, post-training, reinforcement learning and agent tool use are mostly done on CPUs rather than on AI accelerators. He described Graviton as "the strongest CPU chip," offering up to 30-40% better price-performance than alternatives. That is Amazon's own claim and the source gives no independent comparison.
Jassy said demand for older chip generations also remains strong as new ones launch. After the launch of Graviton 5, backlog for prior-generation Graviton instances still more than doubled quarter over quarter. Short-term capacity for prior-generation Trainium instances sells at a premium compared with the first half of the year.
Trainium to leave AWS in late 2027
Because Trainium demand is so strong, Jassy said customers keep asking Amazon to offer it outside of AWS. "We intend to do so late in 2027," he said. The source gives no further detail on how that would work.
The comments came alongside broader AWS results. Amazon said AWS grew 39.3% year over year, its sixth straight quarter of acceleration and its fastest growth in nearly five years, as enterprises run more of their core and AI workloads on AWS.
Inference already over half of AWS AI revenue
Jassy said demand for AWS capacity remains exceptionally strong. In his words, enterprises are still very early in using inference at scale, yet inference already accounts for well over half of AWS's AI revenue and is growing. He added that AWS also has a lot of training revenue.
For customers, the message is that Amazon is positioning its in-house chips as a cheaper path for AI and general workloads, and plans to widen access to Trainium beyond its own cloud. How much that changes the market will depend on the late-2027 rollout, for which the source offers no specifics.
