Amazon to sell Trainium AI chips outside AWS from late 2027, Jassy says, taking its custom silicon into the hardware market

SEATTLE — Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the October 29 third-quarter earnings call that the company intends to start selling its homegrown Trainium AI chips to customers outside AWS in late 2027. Jassy said demand for Trainium is so strong that customers keep asking to use the chips beyond AWS, which is why the company will make them available externally. It is the first firm timetable Amazon has given for Trainium sales outside its cloud: until now, customers could rent Trainium compute through AWS but could not buy the chips.

Custom silicon is already AWS's cost weapon

Trainium is Amazon's chip designed for AI training and inference, alongside Graviton for general computing. Jassy told analysts that revenue commitments for both Graviton and Trainium have each grown more than 20-fold year over year; customers using the custom silicon saved more than $2 billion in the third quarter alone; and most workloads on the Bedrock platform now run on Trainium. In other words, before selling a single chip externally, Amazon has already used Trainium to push down the cost of its own cloud.

The backdrop: AWS growing at its fastest in nearly five years

The announcement comes as AWS accelerates: third-quarter AWS sales reached $46 billion, up 39.3% year over year — its fastest growth in nearly five years and its sixth straight quarter of acceleration — for an annualized run rate of about $184 billion. Amazon's total sales were $201.9 billion, up 12%, slightly below market expectations. The company expects about $220 billion in cash capital spending in 2026, mostly for AWS, and meaningfully more in 2027. Jassy also projected AWS growth above 40% in both 2027 and 2028, and said AWS could become a trillion-dollar-revenue business within five to ten years.

Jassy's candid trade-off: faster cash versus more cash

Jassy did not present external sales as an unqualified win. Selling chips to outside customers realizes revenue sooner, he said, but keeping the chips inside AWS for EC2 and Bedrock services drives more absolute revenue and free cash flow over five to six years. The move also means Amazon will compete with Nvidia at the hardware layer for the first time: until now the two companies' relationship has mainly been customer and supplier, whereas Amazon would now sell its own chips to third-party data centres.

This remains a plan, not a sale in progress: the product form, pricing, first customers and supply arrangements for external Trainium sales have not been announced, and the late-2027 timing could shift with capacity and market conditions. This report is compiled from the Amazon third-quarter earnings call transcript and related reporting.