Apple has confirmed it uses custom AI chips from Amazon Web Services.
At the annual Amazon Web Services Reinvent conference this week a new AI chip, Trainium2, was announced as generally available to rent and Apple confirmed they would be customers for the device.
On the same day Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, discussed Apple’s use of the service.
“We have a strong relationship, and the infrastructure is both reliable and able to serve our customers worldwide,” Dupin said.
Benoit said Apple had used AWS for more than a decade for services including Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music as well as the Inferentia and Graviton chips to serve search services.
“In early stages of evaluating Trainium2 we expect early numbers up to 50% improvement in efficiency with pretraining.”
AWS's cloud unit also showed off new data centre servers backed by their new chips, which will seek to challenge Nvidia, who currently hold a massive sway over the AI market with more than a 70% market share.
The new AWS servers are based on 64 of the Trainium2 chips, linked together in a massive supercomputer with hundreds of thousands of chips.
AI start-up Anthropic have helped set this up and while they will be the first to use it, Apple has also joined on board for this as well.