Intel, AWS Expand Strategic Collaboration, Helping Advance U.S.-based Chip Manufacturing

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Intel Corp. (INTC) and Amazon Web Services. Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced a co-investment in custom chip designs under a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar framework covering product and wafers from Intel. This is a significant expansion of the two companies’ longstanding strategic collaboration to help customers power virtually any workload and accelerate the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

As part of the expanded collaboration, Intel will produce an AI fabric chip for AWS on Intel 18A, the company’s most advanced process node. Intel will also produce a custom Xeon 6 chip on Intel 3, building on the existing partnership under which Intel produces Xeon Scalable processors for AWS.

“This expansion of our longtime relationship with AWS reflects the strength of our process technology and delivers differentiated solutions for customer workloads,” said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. “Intel’s chip design and manufacturing capabilities, combined with the comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, AI and machine learning services of AWS, will unleash innovation across our shared ecosystem and support the growth of both businesses, as well as a sustainable domestic AI supply chain.” 

“At AWS, we're committed to delivering the most powerful and innovative cloud infrastructure to our customers,” said Matt Garman, CEO at AWS. “By co-developing next-generation AI fabric chips on Intel 18A, we continue our long-standing collaboration, dating back to 2006 when we launched the first Amazon EC2 instance featuring their chips. Our continued collaboration allows us to empower our joint customers with the ability to run any workload and unlock new AI capabilities.”

With this expanded collaboration, Intel and AWS underscore their commitments to accelerating U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and creating a vibrant AI ecosystem in Ohio. Intel continues to be committed to the New Albany area and its plans to build leading edge semiconductor manufacturing. AWS is planning to invest $7.8 billion to expand its data center operations in Central Ohio, in addition to the $10.3 billion it has invested in the state of Ohio since 2015.

“This collaboration between Intel and AWS is a great development for U.S.-based manufacturing and solidifying Ohio as a leader in AI,” said Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. “Today’s announcement furthers Intel’s commitment to U.S. manufacturing sites, like Ohio’s, as well as AWS’s commitment to its nearly decade-long investment in our state.”

AWS and Intel have a more than 18-year relationship dedicated to helping organizations of all sizes to develop, build, and deploy their mission critical workloads in the cloud, while also supporting them to reduce cost and complexity, increase security, accelerate business outcomes, and scale to meet their current and future computing requirements. Going forward, Intel and AWS also intend to explore the potential for further designs to be produced by Intel based on Intel 18A and future process nodes including Intel 18AP and Intel 14A, which is expected to be produced in Intel’s Ohio facilities, as well as the migration of existing Intel designs to these platforms.