Amazon Web Services Inc. has opened a $11 billion data center campus in Indiana that will run artificial intelligence models for Anthropic PBC.

CNBC reported the milestone today. The campus, which is located near Lake Michigan, was built as part of an initiative called Project Rainier that AWS announced last year. It will host both training and inference workloads. 

AWS parent Amazon.com Inc. has invested $8 billion in Anthropic since the start of 2024. The ChatGPT rival uses AWS infrastructure to run many of its most important workloads. Additionally, Anthropic has reportedly provided the cloud giant with technical input that helped improve the efficiency of its AI infrastructure.

The Project Rainier campus currently hosts seven buildings that contain nearly 500,000 AWS Trainium2 chips. That number is expected to top 1 million by the end of the year. Further down the line, AWS will reportedly construct an additional 23 buildings that are expected to increase the site’s data center capacity to more than 2.2 gigawatts.

The Amazon unit made Trainium2 generally available to cloud customers last December. The processor comprises two compute tiles, or chiplets, and four stacks of HBM3 memory. Those components sit on a base layer called an interposer that enables them to exchange data with one another.

The Trainium2’s compute tiles host eight cores based on a custom design called the NeuronCore-v3. According to AWS, each NeuronCore-v3 core comprises four compute modules. One runs calculations on one piece of data at a time, while another can process multiple pieces of data at once. The two other modules are optimized to run linear algebra operations and custom code provided by developers.

Project Rainier’s chips run in systems called UltraServers. According to AWS, each machine contains four servers that host 16 Trainium2 chips apiece. The chips exchange data via a custom interconnect dubbed NeuronLink.

AWS plans to launch a new machine learning accelerator, AWS Trainium3, by the end of the year. It will become available to not only Anthropic but also other customers. Last December, AWS disclosed that UltraServers equipped with Trainium3 are expected to provide four times the performance of current-generation machines.

Project Rainier should make it easier for Anthropic to remain competitive with OpenAI Group PBC. Over the past few months, the ChatGPT developer has announced plans to deploy 33 gigawatts of data center capacity. OpenAI will use graphics cards from Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., as well as a custom AI chip set to enter mass production next year.

Photo: AWS