Finance
Cerebras systems, Amazon strike deal to offer cerebras AI chips on amazon's cloud
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on March 13, 2026
3 min readLast updated: March 13, 2026
Quick Summary
Amazon and Cerebras Systems have partnered to integrate Cerebras’s wafer-scale AI chips with AWS’s Trainium3 processors to accelerate AI inference workloads, leveraging a “divide-and-conquer” method for improved performance and cost efficiency.
Cerebras and Amazon Launch AI Chip Partnership to Boost AWS, Challenge Nvidia
Amazon and Cerebras Announce Strategic AI Chip Collaboration
SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 (Reuters) - Amazon.com and Cerebras Systems on Friday said they have reached a deal to combine the two companies' computing chips in a new service aimed at speeding up chatbots, coding tools and other artificial intelligence services.
Cerebras: A New Challenger in the AI Chip Market
Valued at $23.1 billion, Cerebras is a chip startup aiming to take on Nvidia by building a fundamentally different kind of AI chip that does not rely on expensive high-bandwidth memory as Nvidia's flagship chips do. Earlier this year, Cerebras signed a $10 billion deal to supply chips to ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Details of the Amazon-Cerebras Partnership
Integration of Cerebras Chips in AWS Data Centers
Under the deal announced Friday, Cerebras chips will sit inside Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers and be linked to Amazon's own Trainium3 custom AI chips, connected with custom networking technology from Amazon.
Accessibility and Customer Impact
"Every customer large or small is on AWS, from individual developers to the largest banks in the world," Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told Reuters, saying the deal will "make it easy as a click to get on Cerebras."
Both companies declined to disclose the size of the deal.
Technical Approach: Tackling AI Inference
Division of Inference Tasks
Amazon and Cerebras will team up to tackle what is known as "inference," where previously trained AI systems take requests from users and spit out answers. The two companies will split up that task into two steps, one called "prefill" where the user's request is transformed from human words into the language of "tokens" that AI computers use, and a "decode" stage where the AI computer provides the answer the user is looking for.
Role of Trainium3 and Cerebras Chips
Amazon said its Trainium3 chips will handle prefill, while Cerebras chips handle decoding, what Feldman told Reuters is a "divide and conquer strategy."
Competitive Landscape: Amazon, Cerebras, and Nvidia
Comparison with Nvidia’s Upcoming Strategy
It is a similar strategy to the one that analysts expect Nvidia to unveil next week, when it details how it plans to combine its own graphics processing unit (GPU) chips with those from Groq, a startup it spent $17 billion on in late December. In a statement, Amazon said that it could not yet make a detailed comparison between its offering, which will come online in the second half of this year, and Nvidia's as-yet-unrevealed offering, but Amazon expects its service to be a better value.
Amazon’s Expectations for Trainium3 and Future Chips
"The timeline for that (Nvidia-Groq) pairing remains unclear while our Trainium3 program is just months away from running production workloads," Amazon said in response to Reuters questions. "What we can say is that we believe (Trainium3)—and future (Trainium4)—will continue to lead in price-performance versus merchant GPUs."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Editing by Franklin Paul)
Key Takeaways
- •Cerebras Systems is now valued at around $23 billion after its latest $1 billion Series H funding led by Tiger Global, signaling strong investor confidence. (bloomberg.com)
- •Cerebras previously secured a major compute supply deal with OpenAI worth over $10 billion to deliver 750 megawatts through 2028, emphasizing its growing role in AI infrastructure. (techcrunch.com)
- •The AWS–Cerebras collaboration will combine AWS’s Trainium3 chips for request encoding (“prefill”) and Cerebras chips for decoding responses, aiming to offer customers cost-effective, high-performance AI inference in the second half of 2026. (tomshardware.com)
References
Frequently Asked Questions about Cerebras Systems, Amazon strike deal to offer Cerebras AI chips on Amazon's cloud
1What is the purpose of the Cerebras and Amazon AI chip deal?
The deal aims to combine Cerebras AI chips with Amazon's Trainium3 chips on AWS, speeding up AI services like chatbots and coding tools.
2How will Cerebras and Amazon split the processing tasks?
Amazon's Trainium3 chips will handle the prefill phase, while Cerebras chips will manage the decode phase of AI inference processing.
3When will the combined Cerebras and Amazon AI service be available?
The new AI chip service is expected to be available in the second half of this year.
4How does this partnership position Amazon and Cerebras against Nvidia?
The collaboration seeks to offer a price-performance advantage and compete directly with Nvidia's expected upcoming AI chip solutions.
5What industries are targeted by this Cerebras and Amazon deal?
The service targets a variety of customers on AWS, from individual developers to large banks and enterprises globally.
