Annapurna Labs was acquired by Amazon — this page is preserved as an archive. Visit fobi.com for current frontier-tech coverage.
Annapurna Labs was a Networking & Custom Silicon company founded in 2011 and based in Austin, USA. It was acquired by Amazon for $350M.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Valuation | Lead investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 22, 2015 | Acquired | $350M | $350M | Amazon |
A family of Arm-based, server-class CPUs (Graviton4 being the latest) designed by Annapurna for Amazon Web Services and offered across EC2. Graviton delivers strong price-performance and energy efficiency versus x86, and has become a default platform for a large share of AWS compute—including pre-training workloads for foundation-model companies. It is the cornerstone of Amazon's vertical-integration and cost strategy in the cloud.
Custom machine-learning training accelerators (Trainium2 in volume, with successors on the roadmap) built to train large models on AWS at lower cost than merchant GPUs. Deployed in large 'UltraCluster' configurations with the Neuron SDK and high-speed interconnect, Trainium anchors Amazon's bid to reduce dependence on Nvidia for frontier-model training and powers major customer and Anthropic workloads.
Purpose-built inference accelerators (Inferentia2) optimized for high-throughput, low-cost deployment of deep-learning models—especially large language and generative models—on AWS. Paired with the Neuron compiler and runtime, Inferentia lets AWS customers serve models more economically than on GPUs for many workloads, complementing Trainium to give Amazon a full custom-silicon stack for the AI lifecycle.
A combination of dedicated Nitro cards, a security chip, and a lightweight hypervisor that offloads networking, storage, and security from the main server CPU, underpinning the performance, isolation, and security of modern EC2 instances. Originating from Annapurna's silicon, Nitro is foundational infrastructure across AWS, enabling bare-metal performance and the confidential, multi-tenant architecture of Amazon's cloud.