Amazon bought a small Israeli chip company called Annapurna Labs in 2015 for a reported few hundred million dollars. It is now the reason AWS can offer AI compute without paying NVIDIA margin on every instance.
Trainium and Inferentia split the workload the way the economics actually split: training is expensive and occasional, inference is cheap and constant, and the second is where a cloud provider’s cost structure is decided.
The strategic point is that none of it is for sale. Amazon is not trying to be a chip company — it is removing a supplier from its own cost base, and renting the result back to customers as capacity.