Amazon just tripled its order of Nvidia chips over ‘surging demand’

Amazon and Nvidia just got a lot closer. The two companies announced Wednesday an expanded partnership that includes a deal to add another 2 million Nvidia GPU chips to Amazon’s data centers.

These GPUs, which are designed to handle the heavy compute demands of training and running AI models, include Nvidia Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra GPUs. The chips will head to Amazon Web Services’ data centers in 2027 and 2028.

The announcement, made during Nvidia’s quarterly earnings call, comes just five months after Amazon agreed to deploy more than 1 million Nvidia GPU s across AWS infrastructure starting this year. Nvidia said in a statement that since then, “demand has exceeded those expectations.”

Neither company shared financial terms. It’s unclear what the exact return will be for Nvidia. But considering GPU unit costs, the deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.

The announcement is notable not just for its size and the speed in which it grew, but also because it extends beyond Amazon buying more Nvidia chips. And it’s happening even as Amazon invests in its own potentially competing AI chips.

Nvidia said Wednesday that its technology, including the networking hardware that connects thousands of GPUs into one system, as well as its open models, CPUs, data processing software, and robotics platform, will also be integrated across AWS.

The companies said “surging demand” from startups, enterprises, AI labs, and even governments influenced the decision to work more closely.

The expanded partnership comes as Amazon ramps up its own AI chip efforts — particularly with CPUs, which are the general purpose processors at the heart of servers.

Amazon has been building its own chips to lessen its dependence on Nvidia and even compete with the chip giant. Amazon’s AI chief Peter DeSantis has said that AWS is in talks to sell its Trainium chips — which are a direct alternative to Nvidia’s H100 or Blackwell chips for deep learning workloads — to other companies for use in data centers. Amazon’s Arm-built Graviton CPU is also seen as a challenger to traditional server chips from Intel and AMD.

Amazon has said its custom chip business is growing, noting on its last earnings call that it crossed a $25 billion annualized revenue run rate, driven by $225 billion in total commitments from AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.

But, it seems Nvidia is still the GOAT in the world of AI chips.

With the 2 million GPU chips Amazon is adding to AWS starting in the third quarter, Nvidia also plans to send an unspecified number of Vera CPUs, “some integrated with Rubin, others standalone,” according to Nvidia CFO Colette Kress.