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

In 2018, Amazon Web Services has launched Graviton, its line of locally produced CPU chips for data center servers. Six years later, the vast majority of AWS’s largest server customers have become Graviton users.

Rahul Kulkarni, director of compute and AI/ML at AWS, told Business Insider that more than 90% of the top 1,000 elastic computing, or EC2, cloud customers use Graviton chips. Customers can access Graviton chips only through AWS EC2 servers.

“This 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 more than 50,000 customers, including the top 100 EC2 users, were using 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 is not forced to purchase processors only from other vendors, like Intel or AMD. Graviton also uses Arm-based designs, which are more cost-effective and power-efficient than conventional x86-powered chips.

Amazon does not disclose revenue from its custom silicon business. The company is expected to announce its third-quarter results on Thursday.

Kulkarni said Graviton’s value for money, energy efficiency and overall performance have led to greater customer adoption. Large companies such as Epic Games, Databricks and Pinterest are important Graviton customers, he said.

“We are very committed to custom silicon, and this is an area that we will continue to invest in at a very aggressive pace going forward,” Kulkarni said.

AI Inference

AWS considered designing custom chips after James Hamilton, senior vice president and distinguished engineer, wrote a six-page internal strategy document in 2013. brought this project to fruition by acquiring Israel-based chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015.

Bernstein Research said last year that Amazon was the “most successful” designer of Arm-based server chips, supplying more than 50% of the world’s chips. He estimated that Graviton accounted for about 20% of AWS’ CPU usage by mid-2022. AWS offers access to other processors, including Intel and AMD chips.

Kulkarni said Graviton was still primarily used for general computing purposes, but a growing number of customers were using it for CPU-based AI inference and machine learning frameworks. He said Graviton, now in its fourth generation, has added features and capabilities that enable unique use cases, like AI inference, that don’t necessarily require dedicated machine learning processors.

“This is a new revenue channel that goes beyond what AWS intended to use Graviton for,” Kulkarni said.

Over the past two years, Amazon has been reduce costsclosing dozens of projects and scaling back unprofitable units. AWS’ chip design business appears immune to these cuts.

In a conference call with analysts in August, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Graviton had been “very successful” for AWS. He added that Custom AI chips from AWSInferentia and Trainium, were expected to follow a similar growth trajectory – even though they saw Mixed results due to Nvidia’s lead.

“This is one of the most strategic areas for us,” Kulkarni said. “We will absolutely continue to drive innovation in custom silicon, as we have for over 10 years.”

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