Over 90% of AWS’s biggest data center customers are now using its homegrown Graviton chips, executive says

• AWS’s Graviton CPU chips are used by over 90% of its 1,000 largest data center customers.
• Graviton chips, launched in 2018, are becoming an important part of AWS’s overall business.
• AWS’s custom silicon strategy includes AI chips like Inferentia and Trainium.

In 2018, Amazon Web Services launched Graviton, its own line of homegrown central processing unit chips for data center servers. Just six years later, the vast majority of AWS’s largest server customers have become Graviton users.

Rahul Kulkarni, AWS’s director of compute and AI/ML, told Business Insider that more than 90% of the 1,000 largest elastic compute cloud (EC2) customers are running Graviton chips. Customers can only access Graviton chips through AWS’s EC2 servers.

“It just continues to show how Graviton is gaining traction,” Kulkarni said.

The new data point is the latest indication of Graviton’s growing success. AWS previously said that over 50,000 customers, including the 100 largest EC2 users, run Graviton-based servers.

Graviton is a key part of AWS’s data center business. Designing its own chips allows AWS to reduce data center operating costs because it no longer has to buy CPUs from other vendors, like Intel or AMD. Graviton also uses Arm-based designs, which are more cost and energy-efficient than conventional x86-powered chips.

Amazon doesn’t disclose the size of revenue from its custom silicon business. The company is scheduled to announce its third-quarter earnings on Thursday.

Kulkarni said Graviton’s price value, energy efficiency, and general performance drive more customer adoption. Big enterprises, such as Epic Games, Databricks, and Pinterest, are all major Graviton customers, he said.

“We have a lot of engagement going on in custom silicon, and that’s an area that we will continue to invest in at a very aggressive pace going forward,” Kulkarni said.

AI inference

AWS started considering designing its own custom chips after its SVP and distinguished engineer, James Hamilton, wrote an internal 6-page strategy document in 2013. In 2015, AWS doubled down on this plan by acquiring Israel-based chip designer Annapurna Labs.

Bernstein Research wrote last year that Amazon is the “most successful” Arm-based server chip designer, supplying over 50% of the Arm server chips worldwide. It estimated Graviton accounted for roughly 20% of AWS’s CPU usage as of mid-2022. AWS offers access to other processors, including Intel or AMD chips.

AWS’s Kulkarni said Graviton is still mostly used for general computing purposes, but a growing number of customers are using it for AI inference and machine learning frameworks. He said that Graviton, now in its fourth generation, has added new features and capabilities that enable unique use cases, like AI inference, that don’t necessarily need dedicated machine learning processors.

“It’s a new revenue channel that goes beyond what AWS had anticipated Graviton to be used for,” Kulkarni said.

In the past couple of years, Amazon has been cutting costs across the company, shuttering dozens of projects or scaling down unprofitable units. AWS’s chip-designing business appears safe from those cutbacks.

During an analyst call in August, Jassy said Graviton has been “very successful” for AWS. He added that AWS’s custom AI chips, Inferentia and Trainium, are expected to follow a similar growth trajectory, even though they are seeing mixed results due to Nvidia’s early head start, as BI previously reported.

“It’s one of the most strategic areas for us,” Kulkarni said. “We will absolutely continue to drive innovation in custom silicon as we have been doing for the past 10-plus years.”

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