ReportWire

Tag: cloud computing services

  • Amazon in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAI and supply its Trainium chips

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    Amazon is in discussions with OpenAI to invest $10 billion in the company while supplying more of its AI chips and cloud computing services, according to The Financial Times. The deal would push OpenAI’s valuation over $500 billion but is likely to raise more questions about the company’s circular investment agreements involving chips and data centers.

    The two companies are also in talks about the possibility of OpenAI helping Amazon with its online marketplace, similar to deals it has made with Etsy, Shopify and Instacart. However, any agreement still wouldn’t allow Amazon to market OpenAI’s most advanced models on its developer cloud platform, as Microsoft holds the exclusive rights to those until the 2030s.

    OpenAI recently restructured its agreement with Microsoft to allow it to use data center capacity from other suppliers. Around the same time, it made a string of deals with NVIDIA, Oracle, AMD and others to build out data center capacity and acquire or rent AI chips.

    The new deal would require OpenAI to use Amazon’s Trainium AI chips and rent more data center capacity from Amazon Web Services (AWS). That’s on top of the $38 billion that OpenAI has already committed to renting servers from AWS over the next seven years.

    These deals have sounded alarms among investors considering their circular nature. In many of those, including this latest Amazon deal, OpenAI is taking investment money and then sending that cash back to the same company for infrastructure or chips. And the amounts are staggering, with just two companies, Softbank and Oracle, spending a combined $400 billion on new data centers for OpenAI’s compute needs. And so far, OpenAI has lost more money than it makes.

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    Steve Dent

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  • Amazon says automation bug caused massive AWS outage

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    Amazon has published a lengthy report about the outage that knocked numerous websites, services, apps and games offline on October 20. It all started with a bug in its automation software DynamoDB, where its AWS customers store their data, which then triggered more issues in its other systems that relied on the software.

    As Amazon explains, DynamoDB maintains hundreds of thousands of DNS records and is supposed to be able to fix any issue automatically. But on October 20, the DynamoDB DNS management system suffered from a bug that resulted in an empty DNS record for Amazon’s data centers in North Virginia. DynamoDB was supposed to repair the issue on its own, but it had failed to do so, prompting Amazon to fix the problem manually. While the issue was happening, all systems that needed to connect to DynamoDB couldn’t and experienced DNS failures, including the customers of its cloud computing services. It felt like half the internet wasn’t working when that happened.

    The websites and services affected by the outage include Amazon itself, Amazon Alexa devices, Bank of America, Snapchat, Canva, Reddit, Apple Music, Apple TV, Lyft, Duolingo, Fortnite, Disney+, Venmo, Doordash, Hulu, PlayStation and even Eight Sleep, whose beds connect to the internet to adjust their temperature and incline. Some of them were slow to respond, while others were completely inaccessible.

    “We apologize for the impact this event caused our customers. While we have a strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses. We know this event impacted many customers in significant ways. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further,” Amazon said in a statement.

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    Mariella Moon

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