Amazon & Cerebras Forge AI Chip Alliance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cerebras Systems have announced a strategic partnership to introduce a new service aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence applications. This collaboration, announced on March 13, 2026, involves integrating Cerebras's specialized AI chips into AWS data centers. These chips will work in conjunction with Amazon's own Trainium3 custom AI chips, interconnected by Amazon's proprietary networking technology.

The joint service targets the critical AI "inference" stage, where trained models process user requests and generate responses. Employing a "divide and conquer" strategy, Amazon's Trainium3 chips will manage the "prefill" phase, converting human language into AI tokens. Subsequently, Cerebras chips will handle the "decode" stage, delivering the final answer to the user.

This approach is positioned as a direct competitor to strategies anticipated from Nvidia. While Amazon could not provide a direct comparison to Nvidia's unrevealed plans, they expressed confidence that their AWS offering, set to launch in the second half of 2026, will provide superior value and performance.

Cerebras, valued at $23.1 billion, aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market with its distinct chip architecture that bypasses the need for expensive high-bandwidth memory. The company had previously secured a significant $10 billion deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI earlier in 2026.