While GPUs remain the chip of choice for training large models, once those models are trained, AI agents built on top of them are causing a shift in the type of chip needed. Agents create compute-intensive workloads like real-time reasoning, writing code, search, and the the coordination involved in managing agents through multi-step tasks. AWS’s latest version of Graviton was designed specifically to handle AI-related compute needs, the company says.

This deal brings more of Meta’s cash back to AWS instead of competitors like Google Cloud. Last August, Meta signed a six-year, $10 billion deal with Google Cloud, though Meta had, until then, primarily been an AWS customer that also used Microsoft Azure.

We couldn’t help but notice that AWS timed the announcement of this deal right as the Google Cloud Next conference wrapped up, like a virtual smirk at its cloud rival. Google, of course, also makes its own custom AI chips and announced new versions of them at the show.

True, Amazon makes its own AI GPU as well: the Trainium, which, despite its name, is used for both training and inference — the stage that happens after a model is trained, when it’s actively processing prompts.