Amazon Web Services (AWS) has entered into a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar contract with Intel to develop custom chip designs.
As part of the co-investment, Intel will produce an AI fabric chip for AWS on Intel 18A, and produce a custom Xeon 6 chip on Intel 3. Intel has long developed slightly customized Xeon Scalable CPUs for AWS.
“This expansion of our longtime relationship with AWS reflects the strength of our process technology and delivers differentiated solutions for customer workloads,” said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO.
“Intel’s chip design and manufacturing capabilities, combined with the comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, AI, and machine learning services of AWS, will unleash innovation across our shared ecosystem and support the growth of both businesses, as well as a sustainable domestic AI supply chain.”
Matt Garman, CEO at AWS, added: “At AWS, we're committed to delivering the most powerful and innovative cloud infrastructure to our customers.
"By co-developing next-generation AI fabric chips on Intel 18A, we continue our long-standing collaboration, dating back to 2006 when we launched the first Amazon EC2 instance featuring their chips. Our continued collaboration allows us to empower our joint customers with the ability to run any workload and unlock new AI capabilities.”
The agreement is expected to lead to continued investment at Intel's fab in Oregon.
At the same time, AWS plans to invest $7.8 billion to expand its data centers in Central Ohio, following a previous $10.3bn investment.
The deal comes after Intel announced that it would pause the construction of fabs in Europe and spin off its foundry business as sales cratered.
