Annapurna Labs is an Israeli microelectronics company. Since January 2015 it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com. Amazon reportedly acquired the company for its Amazon Web Services division for US$350–370M.[1][2]
History
Annapurna Labs, named after the Annapurna Massif in the Himalayas, was co-founded in 2011[3] by Bilic "Billy" Hrvoje, a Bosnian Jewish refugee, Nafea Bshara, an Arab Israeli citizen,[4][5] and Ronen Boneh with investments from the independent investors Avigdor Willenz, Manuel Alba, Andy Bechtolsheim, the venture capital firm Walden International, Arm Holdings,[6] and TSMC. Board members include Avigdor Willenz, Manuel Alba, and Lip-Bu Tan, the CEO of Intel.
The first product launched under the AWS umbrella was the AWS Nitro hardware and supporting hypervisor in November 2017.[7] Following on from Nitro, Annapurna developed general-purpose CPUs under the Graviton family and machine-learning ASICs under the Trainium and Inferentia brands.[8][9][10]
In November 2024, Annapurna announced its second-generation Trainium 2 intended for training AI models. Based on its internal testing, Amazon claims "a 4-times performance increase between Trainium 1 and Trainium 2".[11] [12]
See also
- AWS Graviton - an ARM-based CPU developed by Annapurna Labs for exclusive use by Amazon Web Services.
External links
References
- Amazon to buy Israeli start-up Annapurna Labs Reuters, 22 January 2015, retrieved 2015-01-24^
- Amazon buys secretive chip maker Annapurna Labs for $350 million ExtremeTech, 23 January 2015, retrieved 2015-01-24^
- Greg Clark, Dan Bensinger. Amazon Enters Semiconductor Business With Its Own Branded Chips