Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to build what it claims will be the world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer. Named Project Rainier, the supercomputer should be operational by 2025.
The announcement was made on December 3 at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
The computer will be powered by AWS’s “Trainium” chips, which are custom-designed AI accelerators intended to deliver high performance while reducing AI training and inference costs. The second-generation Trainium2 chips are expected to quadruple the performance of their predecessors and would be a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs.
Ethical AI
The supercomputer will support the development of advanced AI models for Anthropic, an AI research and security company in which Amazon has invested $4 billion, with an additional $4 billion in funding announced on November 22.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both former senior executives at OpenAI. The company developed the “Claude” family of large language models optimized for different applications, with tasks ranging from customer interaction and rapid data processing to problem solving, advanced coding and content creation.
Claude implements “Constitutional AI”, which is a methodology for aligning AI systems with human values and ethical principles through a predefined “constitution”. This set of rules explicitly defines ethical boundaries, ensuring that AI generates responses that are useful, honest, and harmless.
This approach sets Anthropic apart from OpenAI, which has faced increased scrutiny due to its profit-driven structure and transparency around security measures.
Claude is primarily trained and deployed on AWS infrastructure (although available on other platforms, such as Google Cloud’s Vertex AI).
Amazon Nova
In addition to the hardware advancements, AWS announced “Amazon Nova,” a new family of generative AI models for enterprise customers, as well as a suite of tools for businesses to build smaller, cost-effective AI models, to manage AI agents and ensure production. accuracy through logical validation.
Nova models support over 200 languages and the range includes Nova Canvas for image generation and Nova Reel for video generation.
Amazon claims the models are at least 75% cheaper than the top-performing models in their respective categories.
Industry dominance
Industry analysts view Amazon’s moves as a challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in the AI hardware market. Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moore Insights & Strategy, said: “This innovation shows that Nvidia is no longer the only player in town for AI training. »
Shares of Amazon.com are up 2.01% to US$217.74, and up 50.32% over the past year.
