(Amazon AWS)

Amazon rolls out updated Trainium chip, new AI models at re:Invent conference

A flurry of product announcements from the developer conference in Las Vegas present a road map for Amazon’s AI computing dominance.

Jon Keegan

Today in Las Vegas, at its annual re:Invent developer conference, Amazon AWS made a bunch of product announcements that reveal its plan to continue capitalizing on the AI boom.

AWS currently enjoys a substantial lead in the cloud computing market, serving up AI infrastructure in the cloud to customers large and small using the models of their choice.

Trainium3

Probably the most consequential announcement was about the company’s new Trainium3 custom AI chip. Three years out from ChatGPT’s disruptive debut, AI companies are diversifying their computing resources away from GPU juggernaut Nvidia and starting to sample the price and performance benefits of alternative custom chips, such as Trainium.

Today, AWS announced the Trainium3 UltraServer, powered by the new Trainium3 chips. The company said the Trainium3 chips are 4x as fast and can train models for half the cost of the previous generation. AWS CEO Matt Garman acknowledged the misleading name of the chip, which excels not only at training AI models but also running AI models, known as inference.

“People often give us a little bit of a hard time about product naming in AWS. No, no, it’s true. Well, it turns out Trainium is no exception. We named it Trainium because it’s designed to be an awesome chip for Al training, and it is, but as it turns out, Trainium2 is actually the best system in the world currently for inference,” Garman said.

The company said work on Trainium4 is well underway, and the chips would be compatible with Nvidia systems.

Nova 2 models

Amazon announced updates to its own frontier AI model family called Nova:

Nova Lite (fast and cheap for everyday tasks),
Nova Pro (for complex reasoning workloads),
Nova Sonic (a new speech-to-speech model), and
Nova Omni (an “all-in-one model for multimodal reasoning and image generation”).

The new models may help the company offer cheaper, more efficient AI computing for its customers versus running competing frontier models on popular Nvidia GPUs.

Nova Forge

Complementing the new Nova 2 models is a product called “Nova Forge,” which makes it easier to train customized models using the Nova models as a base. Customers can bring custom data into the training process to easily create specialized expert models using the tool.

AI Factories

Amazon is also rolling out a way for customers to run AWS services inside their own data centers, keeping their data under their control. Amazon AI Factories works with both Amazon Trainium chips as well as Nvidia GPUs. Amazon said an AI factory is like deploying your own private AWS region.

Agents, agents, agents

AI agents were mentioned quite a bit during the keynote, and the company had lots of new offerings to help customers deploy autonomous AI helpers.

Nova Act: A new AWS service that lets customers spin up “fleets of reliable AI agents for automating production UI workflows.”

DevOps Agent: A new “frontier agent” that autonomously helps solve software failures on production systems when human engineers aren’t online. Amazon describes the new agent as “our always-on, autonomous on-call engineer.”

Jon Keegan7h

Amazon AWS and Google set up rare partnership as rivals try to prevent massive network outages

In October, Amazon AWS suffered a major outage, disrupting services for Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Venmo, and United Airlines, among others.

As more and more businesses move their cloud computing to AWS or Google Cloud, the risks of such large outages increase.

To address this, an unusual partnership between rivals AWS and Google seeks to let customers quickly and easily move their data and services between the platforms.

In a press release, Robert Kennedy, VP of network services at AWS, said:

“This collaboration between AWS and Google Cloud represents a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity. By defining and publishing a standard that removes the complexity of any physical components for customers, with high availability and security fused into that standard, customers no longer need to worry about any heavy lifting to create their desired connectivity. When they need multicloud connectivity, it’s ready to activate in minutes with a simple point and click.”

AWS and Google Cloud collaborate on multicloud networking | Google Cloud Blog

To address this, an unusual partnership between rivals AWS and Google seeks to let customers quickly and easily move their data and services between the platforms.

In a press release, Robert Kennedy, VP of network services at AWS, said:

“This collaboration between AWS and Google Cloud represents a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity. By defining and publishing a standard that removes the complexity of any physical components for customers, with high availability and security fused into that standard, customers no longer need to worry about any heavy lifting to create their desired connectivity. When they need multicloud connectivity, it’s ready to activate in minutes with a simple point and click.”

Rani Molla10h

Tesla’s Chinese-made EV sales jumped 10% in November

Tesla sales from its Shanghai plant jumped 10% in November, only the third time those sales have risen in a month this year, Bloomberg reports. These figures don’t break down what share of sales are within China — Tesla’s second-biggest market — or exported, but typically most made there are sold locally.

The news is a rare bright spot these days for the company’s car sales, which are continuing to decline in much of the world amid fierce competition, especially from Chinese automakers, against Tesla’s aging lineup. The FactSet analyst consensus expects Tesla’s global sales to drop 7% in 2025, the second annual decline in a row.

Rani Molla10h

Apple retires AI head to show it’s serious about AI

Yesterday, Apple announced that its AI head, John Giannandrea, who presided over the company’s largely subpar endeavors into generative AI, would retire at the relatively young age of 60.

Giannandrea is set to leave the company this spring — right around the time Apple’s long-delayed, AI-powered Siri is expected to debut, with Microsoft’s corporate VP for AI, Amar Subramanya, taking the reins.

The move signals that Apple, which has invested far less in AI than its Big Tech peers — and has comparatively little to show for it — is finally getting serious about the technology.

“We believe that Subramanya represents the right hire at the right time with the clock ticking on Apple’s AI strategy heading into next year with outside hires a necessary move to improve the AI strategy,” writes Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “We believe that this was a major reset while expecting more outside hires from Cook & Co. to get Apple on the right track when it comes to AI while further preparing the company for its AI Siri launch by mid 2026 which has been delayed due to development challenges and now represents a major turning point in the company’s history.”

The company put it this way: “This moment marks an exciting new chapter as Apple strengthens its commitment to shaping the future of AI for users everywhere.”

John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

The move signals that Apple, which has invested far less in AI than its Big Tech peers — and has comparatively little to show for it — is finally getting serious about the technology.

The company put it this way: “This moment marks an exciting new chapter as Apple strengthens its commitment to shaping the future of AI for users everywhere.”

Rani Molla11h

OpenAI declares “code red” on Google three years after Google declared “code red” on OpenAI

Google’s recent AI hot streak, which includes the much-lauded release of Gemini 3 last month, has OpenAI worried — so much so that CEO Sam Altman has declared a “code red” to improve its flagship product, ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Scholars of chatbot history might remember that after OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, Google declared a “code red” to fight the existential threat the new AI technology posed to Google’s search dominance.

And here we are today!

Rani Molla12/1/25

Tesla sales continued to fall in Europe last month — but there were a few bright spots

Tesla’s self-proclaimed “weakest market” continued to look weak in November, as sales mostly kept dropping year over year across European countries, including Sweden, France, and Spain, Reuters reports.

However, there were a couple of notable bright spots for Tesla, which has suffered due to strong competition and an aging lineup. In Norway, as consumers face the end of certain EV subsidies, Tesla sales jumped 175% in November and about 35% for the first 11 months of 2025. Meanwhile, in Italy, sales increased 58% year on year after declining for six months. From January to November, Tesla sales fell 28% there.