Qualcomm, a US chipmaker based in San Diego, said on September 8 that it issued a warrant to Amazon, giving the company the right to buy about US$4 billion in Qualcomm shares under a deal to develop custom chips for AI data centers.

According to a regulatory filing, the warrant lets Amazon buy Qualcomm shares at US$161.26 each and is tied to up to US$60 billion in business under the deal.

The companies said they will work on chips for AI inference, which runs trained models, and on high-speed optical connectivity for data centers.

Qualcomm also plans to expand its use of Amazon Web Services AI services and infrastructure for chip design workloads.

The deal adds an outside partner to Amazon Web Services’ AI chip efforts.

The cloud company already offers its own Inferentia chips for inference and said its AI chip business reached a US$25 billion run rate.

Amazon has also used equity warrants in some supplier relationships.

The optical connectivity work targets a growing bottleneck in AI data centers as traffic between accelerators increases.

🔗 Source: Reuters

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