In 2018, Amazon Web Services launched Graviton, its line of homegrown central-processing-unit chips for data-center servers. Six years later, the vast majority of AWS's largest server customers have become Graviton users.
Rahul Kulkarni, AWS's director of compute and AI/ML, told Business Insider that more than 90% of the 1,000 largest elastic-compute-cloud, or EC2, customers were running Graviton chips. Customers can access Graviton chips only through AWS's EC2 servers.
The new data point is the latest indication of Graviton's growing success. AWS previously said that over 50,000 customers, including the 100 largest EC2 users, ran Graviton-based servers.
Amazon doesn't disclose its revenue from its custom-silicon business. The company is scheduled to announce its third-quarter earnings on Thursday.
Kulkarni said Graviton's price value, energy efficiency, and general performance drove more customer adoption. Big enterprises such as Epic Games, Databricks, and Pinterest are major Graviton customers, he said.
AWS considered designing custom chips after James Hamilton, a senior vice president and distinguished engineer, wrote an internal six-page strategy document in 2013. It doubled down on this plan by acquiring the Israel-based chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015.
Bernstein Research said last year that Amazon was the "most successful" designer of Arm-based server chips, supplying over 50% of the chips worldwide. It estimated that Graviton accounted for roughly 20% of AWS's CPU usage as of mid-2022. AWS offers access to other processors, including Intel and AMD chips.
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