Shortly after Amazon announced its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, AWS invited me on a private tour of the chip lab at the heart of the deal.
An exclusive tour of Amazon’s Trainium lab, the chip that’s won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple Julie Bort 5:00 AM PDT · March 22, 2026 Shortly after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced AWS’s groundbreaking $50 billion investment deal with OpenAI, Amazon invited me on a private tour of the chip development lab at the heart of the deal, at (mostly*) its own expense.
Industry experts are watching Amazon’s Trainium chip, created at that facility, for its implications for lower-cost AI inference and, potentially, a dent in Nvidia’s near monopoly.
My tour guides for the day were the lab’s director, Kristopher King (pictured below right) and director of engineering Mark Carroll (below left), as well as the team’s PR person who arranged the visit, Doron Aronson (pictured with yours truly later in the story).
AWS has been Anthropic’s major cloud platform since the AI lab’s early days — a relationship significant enough to survive Anthropic later adding Microsoft as a cloud partner as well, and Amazon’s growing partnership with OpenAI.