On October 29, AWS (Amazon Web Services) announced that Project Rainier, its AI supercluster developed in collaboration with Anthropic, is now live. The system currently integrates nearly 500,000 of Amazon’s custom-built Trainium2 chips and is on track to scale to over 1 million chips by the end of the year, enabling Anthropic’s AI model Claude to run on this massive infrastructure. AWS stated that Project Rainier is approximately 70% larger in scale than any previous AI computing platform the company has deployed. Project Rainier was first unveiled in December of the previous year, with the goal of building a distributed AI computing cluster across multiple data centers in the United States. Just under a year after its announcement, the project has officially launched, marking a major milestone in Amazon’s push to dominate the AI infrastructure space. The Trainium2 chip, designed specifically for training AI systems, delivers extraordinary performance, capable of trillions of operations per second. Unlike general-purpose chips used in consumer devices, Trainium2 is optimized for the massive data workloads required to train complex large language models. Thousands of these chips are interconnected through a new Amazon EC2 UltraServer and EC2 UltraCluster architecture, enabling ultra-fast communication and data sharing across the entire system. Anthropic is leveraging Project Rainier to develop and deploy advanced versions of its AI model, Claude. The company plans to use more than 1 million Trainium2 chips on the platform by the end of 2024. The increased compute power is expected to significantly enhance the model’s intelligence, accuracy, and performance. AWS senior engineer and Trainium chief architect Ron Diamant described the project as a “massive, one-of-a-kind infrastructure initiative” that will help usher in the next generation of AI models. The launch comes just a day after Amazon announced a major workforce reduction of about 30,000 employees, as the company restructures its operations to prioritize investments in AI and its proprietary hardware, including the Trainium chip line. Amazon is set to release its third-quarter financial results later today, with AWS’s growth trajectory under close scrutiny.