Amazon Is Buying Millions More Nvidia Chips for AI—Here's What's Going On
Amazon and Nvidia announced an expanded partnership on August 26, 2026, during Nvidia's quarterly earnings call, adding another 2 million Nvidia chips to Amazon Web Services data centers for deployment in 2027 and 2028. The order includes Nvidia Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra GPUs. TechCrunch
The expanded deal comes roughly five months after Amazon agreed to deploy more than 1 million Nvidia GPUs across AWS infrastructure starting in 2026. That earlier commitment included Blackwell and Rubin architectures across AWS's global cloud regions. Nvidia said that since that earlier agreement, demand for the chips has exceeded expectations. The two companies cited surging demand from startups, enterprises, AI labs, and governments as influencing the decision to deepen the partnership. TechCrunch
Neither Amazon nor Nvidia disclosed financial terms. TechCrunch estimated the deal to be worth tens of billions of dollars. TechCrunch
The scope extends well beyond buying chips. Nvidia's networking hardware for connecting GPUs into systems, open models, CPUs, data processing software, and its robotics platform will all be integrated across AWS. As part of the arrangement, Nvidia plans to send an unspecified number of its Vera CPUs to AWS. Some will be paired with Rubin GPUs, others will be standalone, according to Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Kress also said Nvidia expects Vera CPUs to be deployed by every major cloud provider, newer AI-focused cloud companies, AI labs, and system manufacturers, with shipments already underway to lead partners including Oracle and SpaceX AI. TechCrunch
Amazon also plans to adopt Nvidia's full AI technology stack, including the Omniverse simulation platform, to power its fleet of warehouse robots. AWS and Nvidia have collaborated since 2010, beginning with the world's first GPU cloud instance — a virtual server in the cloud that offered GPU power for rent, which was a new idea at the time. TechCrunch AWS
The chip deal arrives alongside Nvidia's notification to customers about AI-related price hikes above 15 percent on systems shipped early next year, including those featuring its flagship Vera Rubin platform. Bloomberg
In parallel with its Nvidia procurement, Amazon is advancing its own chip strategy. Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis has said AWS is in talks to sell its Trainium chips to other companies for use in their own data centers. These chips are positioned as an alternative to Nvidia's H100 or Blackwell chips. Amazon said its custom chip business crossed a $25 billion annualized revenue run rate, driven by $225 billion in total commitments from AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI. TechCrunch
The broader context here is that Amazon is running two strategies at once, and they are not necessarily in conflict. On one track, AWS is deepening its dependence on Nvidia's roadmap — committing to Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, Rubin Ultra, Vera CPUs, networking, and Omniverse. On the other, it is building out Trainium as a product to sell to external data center customers. Think of it like a company that buys electricity from the grid while also building its own solar farm to sell power to neighbors. AWS's internal needs for running AI workloads at scale almost certainly exceed what its own chips can supply in the near term, making Nvidia GPUs a volume necessity even as Trainium targets a different margin profile and customer segment. The $225 billion in commitments from AI labs suggests the demand underpinning both tracks is not speculative.
The price hikes add another variable worth considering. If Nvidia is raising system prices above 15 percent on Vera Rubin shipments, the economics of large-scale GPU deployment shift for every major cloud provider, not just Amazon. AWS's custom silicon push gains a sharper cost-justification narrative when the primary alternative supplier is raising prices on its flagship platform. Whether Trainium can deliver competitive performance per dollar at the workloads that matter most to AI labs remains an open question, but Amazon's willingness to sell it externally signals confidence that the gap is narrowing.
Nvidia's Vera CPU roadmap also deserves attention. Nvidia's ambition to place Vera across every major cloud provider, AI-focused cloud company, and AI lab would extend its footprint beyond GPUs into the general-purpose computing layer that currently belongs to AMD and Intel. If Kress's expectation materializes, the competitive dynamics in the data center CPU market shift in a meaningful way.
AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) are all set to be among the first cloud providers to deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin-based instances in 2026. The competitive pressure to offer the latest Nvidia architectures is uniform across the major cloud providers. Amazon's move to lock in 2 million additional GPUs through 2028 is as much about securing supply as it is about capacity planning.
For the broader market, the signal is that demand for AI chips at cloud scale continues to outpace even aggressive purchasing plans. Amazon ordered 1 million Nvidia GPUs in March 2026. Five months later, it doubled that commitment. Nvidia's statement that demand exceeded expectations since the first deal suggests the gap between projected and actual consumption is widening, not stabilizing — which, if sustained, will keep spending trajectories steep across the industry for the foreseeable future.
