AWS and Anthropic to Build 5x Larger Supercomputer

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Anthropic are building a supercomputer that will be five times the size and have five times the performance of the one Anthropic used to train its current generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Dubbed “Project Rainier,” the EC2 UltraCluster of Trn2 UltraServers will use hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips for model training — five times the size of its previous cluster — AWS said in a Tuesday (Dec. 3) press release.

The Trn2 UltraServers, which were introduced Tuesday and are available in preview, are designed to provide performance and cost efficiency for customers who are training and deploying AI models and future large language models and foundation models, according to the release.

“With models approaching trillions of parameters, we understand customers also need a novel approach to train and run these massive workloads,” David Brown, vice president of compute and networking at AWS, said in the release. “New Trn2 UltraServers offer the fastest training and inference performance on AWS and help organizations of all sizes to train and deploy the world’s largest models faster and at a lower cost.”

Project Rainier will deliver more than five times the number of exaflops — a measure of performance for a supercomputer — used by Anthropic for its current AI models, according to the release.

“When completed, it is expected to be the world’s largest AI compute cluster reported to date available for Anthropic to build and deploy their future models on,” the release said.

This news came about two weeks after Amazon and Anthropic announced an expanded partnership that includes Amazon investing another $4 billion in the AI company — bringing its total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion — and Anthropic making AWS its primary training partner.

The expanded partnership builds on one announced in September 2023 that included Amazon making its initial investment of $4 billion in Anthropic and Anthropic making AWS its primary cloud partner.

“By combining Anthropic’s expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS’s world-class infrastructure, we’re building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organizations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology,” Anthropic said in a Nov. 22 press release announcing the expanded partnership.