Uber is the latest to be won over by Amazon’s AI chips

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Uber was expanding its contract for AWS cloud services to run more of its ride-sharing features on Amazon’s chips. Uber will particularly expand its use of AWS’s Graviton (a low-power, ARM-based server CPU) and start a new trial testing Trainium3, AWS’s Nvidia competitor AI chip.

This deal is a bit less about a long-term threat to Nvidia than it is a thorough thumbing of the nose by Amazon at AWS’s cloud competitors, Google and Oracle.

While Uber historically ran its own data centers, back in 2023, the ride-hailing company famously signed giant, multi-year cloud computing deals with Oracle and Google. The idea was to move the majority of its IT infrastructure off its own data centers and onto these two clouds, it said.

Even in December, Uber publicly reiterated that goal, writing in a blog post:

In February 2023, Uber began transitioning from on-premise data centers to the cloud using OCI and Google Cloud Platform, taking on the dual challenge of shifting massive workloads and introducing Arm-powered compute instances into a previously x86-dominated environment.

Uber particularly called out in that post the use of the ARM chips made by Ampere in Oracle’s cloud. This is where things get interesting.

If you want a crash course in how inter-tangled Silicon Valley can be, take a look at the history of Ampere.

Ampere was founded by former Intel bigwig Renee James after she was not promoted to CEO at the chipmaker. She pulled all her strings, including her power at her then-job as an investor at private equity firm Carlyle and her board seat position at Oracle, to raise the cash to start this company. Oracle owned about one-third of the company, and James had to give up her status as an independent Oracle director because of that investment.

(James was, by the way, a key board person who helped vote in Oracle’s $9.3 billion purchase of NetSuite in 2016, a company where Larry Ellison was a major stockholder. That deal sparked an unsuccessful shareholder lawsuit alleging Oracle overpaid for it.)

In December, Ampere’s major competitor SoftBank acquired it, and Oracle sold its stake for a handsome $2.7 billion pre-tax gain. James left Oracle’s board at the end of 2024 and is no longer working at Ampere.

Oracle is raising money as fast as it can to build data centers for OpenAI and Stargate. Ellison said Oracle sold Ampere because he believed designing chips in-house for its data centers was no longer a competitive advantage. It prefers to buy the chips and has signed massive deals with Nvidia.

It’s worth noting that Oracle, SoftBank, and Nvidia are also part of OpenAI’s orbit of circular deals that are supposed to fund the model maker’s massive data center build-out.

But now AWS is announcing it has nabbed a bigger contract from one of Oracle’s star customers, Uber, because it has in-house-designed chips.

Uber joins Anthropic, OpenAI, and Apple as Big Tech companies that have signed on or increased their usage of AWS because of these AI chips. In December, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Trainium was already a multibillion-dollar business.

(For a look at the team and lab that design these chips, check out our exclusive tour of the facility.)