BusinessJun 22, 2026
Amazon Is Positioning Itself for AI's Next Wave. Chips Are Just the Beginning
Rhea Lobo
Amazon wants a bigger share of the AI boom. It's starting by becoming an alternative to Nvidia's chips.
The company's AI chief Peter DeSantis confirmed this month that Amazon is in talks to sell its custom Trainium chips directly to other companies' data centers.
The third version of Trainium is already largely sold out, and demand is building for a fourth version expected next year. This is the move that reframes Amazon as a hardware platform and the investment case changes with it.
AWS today sells access to compute. Customers pay to run workloads on Trainium inside Amazon's infrastructure.
That model is capped by Amazon's own data center footprint. Selling racks of Trainium to third parties breaks that ceiling, letting Amazon capture demand in sovereign cloud markets, in Europe, and anywhere a customer wants locally controlled infrastructure.
The Trainium chip has already produced more than $225B in revenue commitments, according to figures Amazon shared in April.
Amazon acquired semiconductor startup Annapurna Labs in 2015, meaning this chip business has been more than a decade in the making.
DeSantis made the competitive framing explicit. "We're one of a very few players who have the ability to design a chip, design the physical attributes of that chip, and then do the production," he told CNBC.
"When you're thinking about us, you should be thinking about us relative to Nvidia." J.P. Morgan projects capital investment in AI accelerators will hit $800B by 2030, up from just over $300B in 2026.
Amazon doesn't need to take share from Nvidia to win, it just needs to catch a fraction of that new demand.
While the chip story is the structural argument, the near-term catalyst is on the way.
Amazon's four-day Prime Day event (running June 23 through June 26) is the first major commercial test of Alexa for Shopping, an agentic AI assistant that can add items to carts and track price changes autonomously.
BofA analyst Justin Post believes the tool can generate over $200B in incremental gross merchandise value by 2035 and $20B in incremental retail profit.
Adobe projects total Prime Day spending will hit $26.3B across four days, up 9% from last year. BofA separately estimates $8.5B in incremental revenue from the event and believes Amazon is on track to hit or exceed the top of its Q2 revenue guidance of $199B.
The countercase is real. Amazon's own AI chief admitted its Nova models haven't been at the very frontier, putting it behind OpenAI and Anthropic on the capability curve. The stock trades at a PEG ratio of 0.78, which implies the market isn't paying for the upside at all.
