A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

SPECIAL REPORT: AI AND THE CLOUD by Kyt Dotson and Kristen Nicole Martin

Nestled on the ninth floor of an unassuming building in an affluent area of Austin, Texas dubbed The Domain, is one of the world’s most influential research labs powering modern artificial intelligence.

SiliconANGLE got an exclusive, behind-the-scenes tour of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Annapurna Labs, where the cloud powerhouse does the secretive work of designing and testing the upcoming generations of  itsAI accelerator Trainium and custom cloud compute Graviton chips. 

Upon arrival, Martin was greeted in the lobby and escorted to the Labs, a highly restricted area even for Amazon.com Inc. employees.  After being checked in, given a temporary visitor’s pass and a handful of Jolly Ranchers, Martin met with Rami Sinno, director of silicon engineering at AWS. Joining AWS from Arm Holdings PLC, Sinno brought large-scale project management experience to the project since its inception, detailing the challenging work of recruiting a team of talented engineers for the Trainium chip, a completely stealth initiative at the time.

“We formed a team whose mission was to deliver the best machine learning accelerators at cloud scale,” Sinno said. “This was exciting because it was in the early days of high-performance and low-cost AI servers at scale.”

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