GoKawiilOn Tuesday, Amazon announced that Uber was expanding its contract for AWS cloud services to run more of its ride-sharing features on Amazon’s chips. Uber will particularly expand its use of AWS’s Graviton (a low-power, ARM-based server CPU) and start a new trial testing Trainium3, AWS’s Nvidia competitor AI chip.
This deal is a bit less about a long-term threat to Nvidia than it is a thorough thumbing of the nose by Amazon at AWS’s cloud competitors, Google and Oracle.
While Uber historically ran its own data centers, back in 2023, the ride-hailing company famously signed giant, multi-year cloud computing deals with Oracle and Google. The idea was to move the majority of its I.T. infrastructure off its own datacenters and onto these two clouds, it said.
Even in December, Uber publicly reiterated that goal, writing in a blog post:
“In February 2023, Uber began transitioning from on-premise data centers to the cloud using OCI and Google Cloud Platform, taking on the dual challenge of shifting massive workloads and introducing Arm-powered compute instances into a previously x86-dominated environment.”
Uber particularly called out in that post the use of the ARM chips made by Ampere in Oracle’s cloud. This is where things get interesting.
If you want a crash course in how inter-tangled Silicon Valley can be, take a look at the history of Ampere.
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