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Amazon offers AI developers free computing power

Developers of artificial intelligence will be able to train their programs on high-performance computers from Amazon free of charge in future. The online retailer's cloud subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced on Tuesday that it will provide researchers with credits amounting to 110 million dollars (around 103 million euros).

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at Berkeley are taking part in the program, for which AWS is providing servers with 40,000 chips. The company hopes to convince programmers of its own AI processor "Trainium" and take market share away from other providers.

The global leader here is chip manufacturer Nvidia. However, AMD and Alphabet subsidiary Google also have corresponding products on offer. Nvidia owes its dominant market position not only to the performance of its processors, but also to the software ecosystem for their use.

In contrast to Nvidia, however, AWS allows direct programming of Trainium chips, emphasized Gadi Hutt, who is responsible for the development of these processors at the world's largest cloud provider. This is particularly interesting for major customers who rent computing time for tens of thousands of chips. Here, even small changes could lead to major leaps in performance or significantly reduce costs.