(Amazon AWS)

Amazon rolls out updated Trainium chip, new AI models at re:Invent conference

A flurry of product announcements from the developer conference in Las Vegas present a road map for Amazon’s AI computing dominance.

Jon Keegan

12/2/25 3:04PM

Today in Las Vegas, at its annual re:Invent developer conference, Amazon AWS made a bunch of product announcements that reveal its plan to continue capitalizing on the AI boom.

AWS currently enjoys a substantial lead in the cloud computing market, serving up AI infrastructure in the cloud to customers large and small using the models of their choice.

Trainium3

Probably the most consequential announcement was about the company’s new Trainium3 custom AI chip. Three years out from ChatGPT’s disruptive debut, AI companies are diversifying their computing resources away from GPU juggernaut Nvidia and starting to sample the price and performance benefits of alternative custom chips, such as Trainium.

Today, AWS announced the Trainium3 UltraServer, powered by the new Trainium3 chips. The company said the Trainium3 chips are 4x as fast and can train models for half the cost of the previous generation. AWS CEO Matt Garman acknowledged the misleading name of the chip, which excels not only at training AI models but also running AI models, known as inference.

“People often give us a little bit of a hard time about product naming in AWS. No, no, it’s true. Well, it turns out Trainium is no exception. We named it Trainium because it’s designed to be an awesome chip for Al training, and it is, but as it turns out, Trainium2 is actually the best system in the world currently for inference,” Garman said.

The company said work on Trainium4 is well underway, and the chips would be compatible with Nvidia systems.

Nova 2 models

Amazon announced updates to its own frontier AI model family called Nova:

Nova Lite (fast and cheap for everyday tasks),
Nova Pro (for complex reasoning workloads),
Nova Sonic (a new speech-to-speech model), and
Nova Omni (an “all-in-one model for multimodal reasoning and image generation”).

The new models may help the company offer cheaper, more efficient AI computing for its customers versus running competing frontier models on popular Nvidia GPUs.

Nova Forge

Complementing the new Nova 2 models is a product called “Nova Forge,” which makes it easier to train customized models using the Nova models as a base. Customers can bring custom data into the training process to easily create specialized expert models using the tool.

AI Factories

Amazon is also rolling out a way for customers to run AWS services inside their own data centers, keeping their data under their control. Amazon AI Factories works with both Amazon Trainium chips as well as Nvidia GPUs. Amazon said an AI factory is like deploying your own private AWS region.

Agents, agents, agents

AI agents were mentioned quite a bit during the keynote, and the company had lots of new offerings to help customers deploy autonomous AI helpers.

Nova Act: A new AWS service that lets customers spin up “fleets of reliable AI agents for automating production UI workflows.”

DevOps Agent: A new “frontier agent” that autonomously helps solve software failures on production systems when human engineers aren’t online. Amazon describes the new agent as “our always-on, autonomous on-call engineer.”

Rani Molla22h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

24h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla3/13/26

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla3/13/26

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan3/13/26

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea