An exclusive tour of Amazon’s Trainium lab, the chip that’s won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple

Summary

Shortly after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced AWS’s groundbreaking $50 billion investment deal with OpenAI, Amazon invited me on a private tour of the chip development lab at the heart of the deal, at (mostly*) its own expense. Industry experts are watching Amazon’s Trainium chip, created at that facility, for its implications for lower-cost AI inference and, potentially, a dent in Nvidia’s near monopoly. Curious, I agreed to go. My tour guides for the day were the lab’s director, Kristopher King (pictured below right) and director of engineering Mark Carroll (below left), as well as the team’s PR person who arranged the visit, Doron Aronson (pictured with yours truly later in the story). AWS Chip lab leaders Mark Carroll and Kristopher King.Image Credits:TechCrunch/Julie Bort AWS has been Anthropic’s major cloud platform since the AI lab’s early days — a relationship significant enough to survive Anthropic later adding Microsoft as a cloud partner as well, and Amazon’s growing partnership with OpenAI. The OpenAI deal makes AWS the exclusive provider of the model maker’s new AI agent builder, Frontier, which could become an important part of OpenAI’s business if agents become as big as Silicon Valley thinks they will. We’ll see if that exclusivity stands exactly as announced. The Financial Times reported this week that Microsoft may believe OpenAI’s deal with Amazon violates its own deal with OpenAI, namely with Redmond getting access to all of OpenAI’s models and tech. What makes AWS so appealing to OpenAI? As part of this deal, the cloud giant has agreed to supply OpenAI with 2 gigawatts of Trainium computing capacity. This is a giant commitment, given that Anthropic and Amazon’s own Bedrock service are already consuming Trainium chips faster than Amazon can produce them. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 There are 1.4 million Trainium chips deployed across all three generations, and Anthropic’s Claude runs on over 1 million of the Trainium2...