Qualcomm, Amazon partner on customized chips for AI data centers

US chipmaker Qualcomm announced Tuesday a multi-generation product collaboration with Amazon to develop customized silicon and advanced connectivity solutions for artificial intelligence data centers.

The companies will work together on chips designed for AI inference, the process through which trained AI models generate responses or predictions, Qualcomm said in a statement.

The collaboration is aimed at supporting the expansion of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) AI infrastructure as growing workloads increase demand for computing capacity, networking, storage, and memory bandwidth.

Qualcomm and Amazon will also develop optical connectivity solutions capable of reaching speeds of up to 1.6 terabits per second, as well as future-generation technologies.

The connectivity systems will use Qualcomm’s serializer-deserializer and optical digital signal processor technologies to support high-bandwidth connections within Amazon’s data center networks.

Qualcomm also plans to expand its use of AWS infrastructure, including the Amazon Bedrock generative AI platform, for electronic design automation workloads, with the goal of shortening chip design cycles.

“As AI demand accelerates, data center infrastructure will require advances in both computing and connectivity to deliver greater performance with more efficiency,” said Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.

Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president at AWS, said the partnership would help deliver “more performant, efficient, and cost-effective infrastructure” to customers.

Financial details and a timetable for the deployment of the jointly developed technologies were not disclosed.