Uber is the latest company to be acquired by Amazon’s AI chips

Uber is expanding its contract with AWS cloud services to run more ride-sharing features on Amazon chips, Amazon announced Tuesday. Uber will notably expand its use of AWS’s Graviton (an ARM-based low-power server CPU) and begin new beta testing of Trainium3, AWS’s Nvidia-rivaling AI chip.

This deal is less about a long-term threat to Nvidia and more about an all-out mockery by Amazon of AWS’s cloud rivals, Google and Oracle.

While Uber has historically operated its own data centers, in 2023, the popular ride-hailing company signed giant multi-year cloud computing deals with Oracle and Google. The idea was to move the majority of its IT infrastructure from its own data centers to these two clouds, it said.

Even in December, Uber reiterated this goal publicly, writing in a blog post:

In February 2023, Uber began moving from on-premises data centers to the cloud with OCI and Google Cloud Platform, facing the dual challenge of transforming massive workloads and bringing Arm-powered compute instances into an environment previously dominated by x86.

In the post, Uber specifically called for the use of ARM chips made by Ampere in the Oracle cloud. This is where things get interesting.

If you want a crash course in how Silicon Valley is intertwined, take a look at Ampere’s history.

Ampere was founded by Rene James, a senior Intel figure, after he was not promoted to CEO at the chip maker. She used everything she had, including the strength of her then job as an investor at the private equity firm Carlyle and her position on the board of directors at Oracle, to raise money to start this company. Oracle owned about a third of the company, and James was forced to give up her position as an independent director of Oracle because of this investment.

(James, by the way, was a key board member and helped vote on Oracle’s $9.3 billion purchase of NetSuite in 2016, a company of which Larry Ellison was a major shareholder. That deal sparked an unsuccessful shareholder lawsuit alleging that Oracle overpaid for it.)

In December, Ampere’s main competitor, SoftBank, acquired the company, and Oracle sold its stake for a healthy $2.7 billion pre-tax gain. James left the Oracle board at the end of 2024 and no longer works at Ampere.

Oracle is raising money as quickly as possible to build data centers for OpenAI and Stargate. Ellison said Oracle sold Ampere because he believed in-house chip design for its data centers was no longer a competitive advantage. It prefers to buy chips and has signed huge deals with Nvidia.

It should be noted that Oracle, SoftBank and Nvidia are also part of OpenAI’s orbit for circular deals that are supposed to finance the construction of the model maker’s massive data center.

But now AWS is announcing that it has secured a bigger contract from one of Oracle’s star customers, Uber, because it has chips designed in-house.

Uber joins Anthropic, OpenAI, and Apple as major tech companies that have signed on or increased their use of AWS because of these AI chips. In December, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Trainium was already a multibillion-dollar company.

(For a look at the team and lab that designed these chips, check out our exclusive tour of the facility.)