The Stealthy Lab Cooking Up Amazon's Secret Sauce

Amazon's decade-old acquisition of Annapurna Labs has emerged as a pivotal element in its AI strategy, with the once-secretive Israeli chip design startup now powering AWS infrastructure. The $350 million deal, struck in 2015 after initial talks between Annapurna co-founder Nafea Bshara and Amazon executive James Hamilton, has equipped the tech giant with custom silicon capabilities critical to its cloud computing dominance.

Annapurna's chips, particularly the Trainium processor for AI model training and Graviton for general-purpose computing, now form the foundation of Amazon's AI infrastructure. The company is deploying hundreds of thousands of Trainium chips in its Project Rainier supercomputer being delivered to AI startup Anthropic this year. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who led AWS when the acquisition occurred, described it as "one of the most important moments" in AWS history.

Office politics

[phantomfive]

initial talks between Annapurna co-founder Nafea Bshara and Amazon executive James Hamilton...Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who led AWS when the acquisition occurred

All this name dropping makes it look like office politics leaking out into the public. The article also mentions "Matt Garman" for no reason whatsoever. If office politics are that bad that it leaks out into the public, then Amazon is going to quickly become a very bad place to work. Unless you like fighting office politics, then go work there.

Incidentally, the rack wiring in the picture in TFA needs some work, I would never be satisfied with a datacenter with such sloppy wiring.

Re:

[jenningsthecat]

Incidentally, the rack wiring in the picture in TFA needs some work, I would never be satisfied with a datacenter with such sloppy wiring.

The photo in TFA looked to me like a test setup in a lab. They probably swap out components and/or change ports pretty frequently, so I wouldn't expect good lead dress, cable bundling, or even labelling in that environment.

And yet, my Amazon recommendations suck even more

[gweihir]

And they seem to be getting worse. Stuff from classes I have never, ever, ever bought get recommended routinely. I have mostly stopped looking at the regular recomendations and removing things. Even Kindle recomendations are 99% crap these days. This thing is so dumb, can do nothing right. The old system was wayy better.

If that is the level their "AI" can perform on, I want nothing to do with it. Oh, and my login regularly breaks and I have to find the one browser on the one computer it still works on. If t

IDF goons are allowed to have a strong presence

[Rujiel]

in every major tech company, like how Google bought Wix for over ten times its yearly revenue and placed its devs in their security team. We are happily assembling a whole new kind of police state, and giving the reins to a foreign power that doesn't believe in the same basic principles of human rights that we do, like those outlined in the first amendment, or habeus corpus.

AI notwithstanding, the most important is Nitro

[kriston]

AI notwithstanding, the most important development from Annapurna is the Amazon Nitro networking infrastructure--the real secret sauce to AWS' success.