Amazon recently announced it will inject $110 million into the AI research field to support the development of its custom-designed Trainium chips. This initiative aims to reduce Amazon's reliance on Nvidia and promote technological advancements in its cloud computing platform, AWS.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed from Midjourney
Trainium is a machine learning chip tailored for deep learning training and inference tasks. Through this investment, Amazon hopes to encourage academia to utilize Trainium chips for research in new AI architectures, machine learning libraries, and performance enhancements.
This initiative, named "Build on Trainium," will provide university researchers with the opportunity to use Trainium for large-scale distributed computing. Amazon stated that they have established a research supercluster containing up to 40,000 Trainium chips, optimized for the unique workloads and computational structures of AI. Through this program, Amazon aims to attract various AI research, including algorithm improvements and studies on large distributed systems.
Amazon has also committed to sharing all AI outcomes achieved through this program in an open-source manner, allowing researchers and developers to further advance technological progress. Additionally, the program will provide funding support for new research and student education, with plans for multiple rounds of research award selections, where selected projects will receive AWS training credits and access to the large Trainium supercluster.
The Catalyst research group at Carnegie Mellon University is participating in this initiative. Computer Science Professor Todd C. Mowry stated that AWS's Build on Trainium program provides their faculty and students with large-scale access to modern accelerators, aiding in the expansion of research in tensor program compilation, machine learning parallelization, and language model services and tuning.
Amazon's investment not only demonstrates its ambition in the AI field but also further promotes collaboration with academia, striving to maintain a competitive edge at the forefront of AI technology.
Key Points:
🌟 Amazon invests $110 million to support university AI research, reducing reliance on Nvidia.
🖥️ The "Build on Trainium" program provides researchers with access to 40,000 Trainium chips.
🔍 All research outcomes will be open-sourced and funding support along with AWS training credits will be provided to selected projects.
