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Annapurna Labs

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

  1. Amazon to buy Israeli start-up Annapurna Labs Reuters, 22 January 2015, retrieved 2015-01-24^
  2. Amazon buys secretive chip maker Annapurna Labs for $350 million ExtremeTech, 23 January 2015, retrieved 2015-01-24^
  3. Greg Clark, Dan Bensinger. Amazon Enters Semiconductor Business With Its Own Branded Chips The Wall Street Journal, 2016-01-06, retrieved 2024-05-21^
  4. Annapurna Labs: AWS' Secret Sauce Forbes, retrieved 2019-12-09^
  5. Rebecca Kopans. If you can dream it, you can do it retrieved 2019-12-09^
  6. Kristen Lisa. AWS and ARM: Working together to re-invent the cloud retrieved 2019-12-09^
  7. A Liguori. The Nitro Project–Next Generation AWS Infrastructure Hot Chips: A Symposium on High Performance Chips, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2018, retrieved 13 October 2023^
  8. Katie Tarasov. How Amazon is racing to catch Microsoft and Google in generative A.I. with custom AWS chips CNBC, 12 August 2023, retrieved 13 October 2023^
  9. Dina Bass. Amazon's Cloud Unit Partners With Startup Hugging Face as AI Deals Heat Up Bloomberg News, 2023-02-21, retrieved 2024-05-21^
  10. Stephen Nellis. Amazon Web Services pairs with Hugging Face to target AI developers Reuters, 2023-02-21, retrieved 2024-05-21^
  11. Amazon ready to use its own AI chips, reduce its dependence on Nvidia Ars Technica, 12 November 2024, retrieved 12 November 2024^
  12. Ben Cohen. The Stealthy Lab Cooking Up Amazon's Secret Sauce Wall Street Journal, 2025-05-10, retrieved 2025-05-10^