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Annapurna Labs key figure Gadi Hutt departs as Amazon continues Blackwell procurement
Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 10:30 PM
Gadi Hutt, a central figure in the development of the Trainium AI chip, has reportedly left Annapurna Labs, Amazon's chip design subsidiary. Despite developing its own silicon, Amazon continues to be a major purchaser of Nvidia's Blackwell architecture for its cloud infrastructure.
Context
The departure of Gadi Hutt, a senior director at Amazon’s chip-designing subsidiary Annapurna Labs, marks a significant leadership transition for the company’s custom AI hardware division. During his tenure, Hutt was a primary advocate for Amazon’s strategy of developing in-house silicon like Trainium and Inferentia to provide lower-cost alternatives to third-party providers. At the AWS re:Invent 2024 conference in December 2024, Hutt explicitly stated, "It's not about unseating Nvidia; it's really about giving customers choices," emphasizing that Amazon aims to reduce AI training costs by up to 40% compared to traditional GPUs.
Despite the push for self-sufficiency, Amazon continues to deepen its reliance on Nvidia’s latest architecture. The company recently announced the deployment of EC2 P6-B200 instances powered by Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to meet high customer demand for frontier model training. Simultaneously, Annapurna Labs is scaling its own infrastructure, including Project Rainier, a massive cluster featuring over 400,000 Trainium2 chips for Anthropic. The loss of a key figure like Hutt comes as Amazon prepares to launch Trainium3 in 2026, which is expected to double the performance of its predecessor while increasing energy efficiency by 50%.
Sources (7)
Amazon AI Chip Product Leader Departs - The InformationAWS' custom chip strategy is cutting into Nvidia's AI dominanceAWS Exec Explains Why Nvidia Is Not a Competitor - Business InsiderWeak demand prevents Amazon from deploying AMD's Instinct AI accelerators in the cloud — the company plans to strengthen its portfolio with Nvidia Blackwell GPUs (Updated) | Tom's HardwareAmazon’s AI Self Sufficiency | Trainium2 Architecture & NetworkingThe Six Five On the Road with Gadi Hutt of Annapurna LabsA review of purpose-built accelerators for financial services | Artificial Intelligence
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