THE TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEW

AWS operates in a market where model architectures evolve faster than traditional hardware procurement cycles. But speed means solving problems most chip designers never face.“ It’ s not only about how quickly you can make the silicon – and you have to make it well, because any mistake means you lose a generation,” he says.“ But it’ s also about taking that silicon, putting it into a server, getting that server into a data centre, setting the network up so you have this incredibly large training cluster.”

AWS designs silicon knowing exactly which servers it will populate, which racks those servers will occupy, how network topology will connect them. That end-to-end ownership compresses timelines that chip manufacturers typically measure in quarters. Trainium3 delivers 4x performance improvements over Trainium 2 with 40 % better performance per watt: important when power limits how much computing fits in a facility. Memory bandwidth, meanwhile, has increased 50 %.

Each generation incorporates feedback from watching how customers use the previous version. Which workloads run well, which don’ t, what needs fixing. All this means David says AWS expects to scale Trainium3 faster than Trainium2.

The power problem that reshapes everything Project Rainier will scale to 2.2 gigawatts. That’ s more than two nuclear power stations feeding a single facility, but it’ s not enough.

David is direct about it.“ These large language model providers are going to need more than 2.2 gigawatts, so then you start to look at other sites that are relatively close by.” AWS has facilities in Indiana and Mississippi, with more locations planned. The distributed approach introduces latency: training clusters that span multiple locations need different software optimisation than clusters in a single building. Physics, rather than ambition, becomes the limit.

Power availability now determines where AWS can build data centres. The company uses Local Zones – technology originally built for media customers who needed low-latency access – to position infrastructure where power exists rather than where traditional regional boundaries might suggest.

But the real challenge isn’ t finding power today. It’ s forecasting what will be needed in three years while accounting for model efficiency improvements that may or may not happen.

30 January 2026