Tech
AWS re:Invent 2024
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent 2024 (Noah Berger/Getty Images)
super mega ultra

Amazon’s AI plans: custom chips, an Anthropic “ultracluster,” and its own foundation model

While Amazon’s new models appear to be competitive in terms of features and performance, that isn’t the main thing that the company is touting — it’s the cost.

Jon Keegan
12/4/24 2:11PM

This week at Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company fleshed out its plans to both serve and compete with the larger AI industry.

AWS is largely AI agnostic. Customers can use pretty much any of the major AI models on the cloud-computing platform, running on servers that use chips from Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and others.

But Amazon has also been building and selling computing powered by its purpose-built AI chips, including its latest Trainium2 chip, which Amazon is now making widely available on AWS’s EC2 service. Amazon says these new Trainium2 instances are built for training and deploying jumbo-sized large language models with better price performance than its current offerings.

Amazon also deepened its partnership with AI startup Anthropic, announcing that it’s building an “ultracluster” of “hundreds of thousands” of Trainium2 servers to train Anthropic’s next-generation LLM. Amazon recently doubled its investment in Anthropic, bringing the total to $8 billion.

Probably the most significant announcement was Amazon’s late entry to the foundational AI-model club. Named “Amazon Nova,” the new LLM comes in four flavors: a text-only Micro and three multimodal models, Lite, Pro, and Premier. Amazon touted benchmark scores for the Nova models, which place it in the same class as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama 3. Amazon’s multimodal Nova models can ingest and generate images and videos, like many of the other top models out there today.

While Amazon’s new models appear to be competitive in terms of features and performance, that isn’t the main thing that the company is touting — it’s the models’ low, low cost.

Running Amazon models on Amazon servers, powered by Amazon chips, yields significant cost savings and low latency. Amazon says its Nova models are “at least 75% less expensive” than the best-performing models available on AWS today.

More Tech

See all Tech
Rani Molla
Tunnel Vision
15h
Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024
tech
Jon Keegan
9/11/25

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

tech
Rani Molla
9/11/25

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

APPLE INTELLIGENCE

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25
tech
Jon Keegan
9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.
©2025 Sherwood Media, LLC