AMAZON.COM Inc. will provide artificial intelligence partner Anthropic with a massive cluster of homegrown chips it says will quintuple the startup’s current processing power.

The company is stringing together hundreds of thousands of its Trainium2 semiconductors into arrays that will make it easier for Anthropic to train the large language models required for generative AI and other machine learning tasks.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud services division, began offering its latest chips to customers on Tuesday, the company said at its annual re:Invent conference.

Amazon last month said it was investing an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, which makes the Claude family of AI models seen as close rivals to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As part of the deal, Anthropic said it would use Amazon’s cloud and its chips to develop its most advanced models.

The new chip cluster, called Project Rainier, will contain “significantly more” than 100,000 chips, Gadi Hutt, who works with customers at Amazon’s Annapurna Labs chipmaking unit, said in an interview. Amazon says it expects the cluster to be the world’s largest set of dedicated AI hardware.

Amazon hopes the chips, the company’s third generation of AI semiconductors, will prove competitive with Nvidia Corp.’s products, offering AWS customers an alternative when developing generative AI products. For most companies, Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which are costly and often in short supply, are the default hardware for such tasks today.

Amazon says it will offer customers computing power backed by Nvidia’s new Blackwell chip starting early next year. –BLOOMBERG