Amazon Web Services (AWS) has secured a major deal with Meta to power its growing artificial intelligence (AI) needs using millions of AWS Graviton chips. The agreement marks a significant win for Amazon's homegrown CPUs, which are designed specifically for AI-related compute tasks.
The Graviton chip is an ARM-based central processing unit (CPU), not a graphical processing unit (GPU). While GPUs remain the preferred choice for training large models, AI agents built on top of trained models create compute-intensive workloads that require CPUs like Graviton. AWS's latest version of Graviton was designed to handle these AI-related compute needs.
The deal brings more of Meta's cash back to AWS instead of competitors like Google Cloud. In August, Meta signed a six-year, $10 billion deal with Google Cloud, but has primarily been an AWS customer that also uses Microsoft Azure.
AWS timed the announcement of this deal right as the Google Cloud Next conference wrapped up, seemingly taking a jab at its cloud rival. Google also makes its own custom AI chips and announced new versions at the show.
The Meta deal allows Amazon to showcase a huge AI customer as a proving point for its homegrown CPUs, which compete with Nvidia's new Vera CPU. The difference is that Nvidia sells its chips and AI systems to enterprises and cloud providers, while AWS only sells access to its chips through its cloud service.