Amazon's AI chips are sold out. The next one won't ship for over a year - and it's already sold out too.
That hasn't slowed Amazon down. AWS AI chief Peter DeSantis told Bloomberg the cloud giant is in early talks to sell its Trainium chips to outside firms for the first time.
Trainium is Amazon's custom AI chip, built to train large models inside AWS data centers.
DeSantis wouldn't say which firms are on the other end of the calls.
The talks go back to a letter Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent shareholders in April. He said the chip arm would hit $50 billion a year if AWS sold to outside buyers like other chipmakers do.
That's about the size of Intel's yearly sales. So Amazon's "side project" is already as big as a top-five chip firm - it just has one customer right now: itself.
AWS pitches Trainium as cheaper and less power-hungry than Nvidia's GPUs, the chips that rule AI training today.
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AWS has avoided selling chips to outside firms for years - and the math explains why.
When AWS uses its own chips inside its cloud, it gets paid twice. Once for the AI work the chips do, and again for the other services those customers need - storage, security, networking, the works.
Sell the chip on its own, and that second revenue stream walks out the door.
Supply is the other roadblock. Trainium sold out almost right away, and Trainium4 is already booked more than a year before launch.
That was before AWS added OpenAI to its lineup in April - and before the $38 billion seven-year deal signed in November 2025 to power OpenAI's compute on AWS.
Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, is another huge Trainium buyer. Its Project Rainier system runs on nearly 500,000 Trainium2 chips, with plans to scale past 1 million by year-end.
To sell chips to new buyers, Amazon has two options. It can push current customers down the waiting list, or get more chips from TSMC - the Taiwanese giant that makes most of the world's top chips.
And TSMC has its own problem there: Nvidia just took Apple's spot as its biggest customer.
Nvidia is on a $326 billion sales run rate right now. A $50 billion rival doesn't dent that on its own.
But Jensen Huang just said Nvidia is moving into CPUs - territory Intel and AMD have ruled for decades. Huang pegs the new AI CPU opportunity for Nvidia at about $200 billion. Meanwhile, Jassy is talking openly about pushing Trainium into Nvidia's lane.
The two biggest names in AI hardware are about to start fighting in each other's back yards.
The next test is whether Amazon can deliver Trainium to outside buyers at scale - or whether supply will keep this $50 billion side business stuck inside AWS for now.
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