Amazon.com Inc is expanding the products it makes and sells under its own brand with a foray into chips for computers and gadgets, adding to a portfolio of products that includes baby wipes, USB cables and batteries.
Annapurna Labs, a subsidiary of the Web retailer, announced on Wednesday that it has developed a line of chips called Alpine to sell to manufacturers and data-center operators.
The semiconductors are based on designs from ARM Holdings PLC and can be used to create products that handle Wi-Fi, stream video, run data centers or be embedded in small, low-cost Internet of Things devices, the company said.
The entry of an Amazon subsidiary into the market for components and systems is a challenge to Intel Corp’s dominance of data-center infrastructure.
The use of ARM’s technology in Intel’s most lucrative market has so far been negligible as the world’s largest chipmaker has kept a grip on its 99 percent market share for server chips.
In November last year, Intel’s data-center business head Diane Bryant said the threat of ARM-based servers was a tool that customers use in price negotiations. ARM’s current market share is less than 0.05 percent, she said.
Amazon agreed to acquire Annapurna Labs in January last year. The Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit is hiring semiconductor engineers to add to its own capabilities and is increasingly seeking to design or tweak its own hardware.
While the Seattle-based Web retailer is a storefront for merchandise from a plethora of manufacturers, it has branched out to offer commoditized products under its own brand. The Annapurna chips are not yet available directly from Amazon’s main e-retail Web site.
Annapurna Labs’s Alpine semiconductors are not targeted at the sort of high-end servers that support Intel’s business and instead are designed for devices that nibble at the edge of the market, such as low-power computers for storage and networking.
Companies such as Synology America Corp, Netgear Inc, Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) and others are building products that use Annapurna’s technology, the company said in the release.
Annapurna is also selling a hardware development kit, which lets its customers modify and extend its chips for their own purposes.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
Australian singer Kylie Minogue says “nothing compares” to performing live, but becoming an international wine magnate in under six years has been quite a thrill for the Spinning Around star. Minogue launched her first own-label wine in 2020 in partnership with celebrity drinks expert Paul Schaafsma, starting with a basic rose but quickly expanding to include sparkling, no-alcohol and premium rose offerings. The actress and singer has since wracked up sales of around 25 million bottles, with her carefully branded products pitched at low-to mid-range prices in dozens of countries. Britain, Australia and the United States are the biggest markets. “Nothing compares to performing
AUSPICIOUS TIMING: Ostensibly looking to spike the guns of domestic rivals, ByteDance launched the upgrade to coincide with the Lunar New Year China’s ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence (AI) app, the company announced on Saturday. ByteDance is one of several Chinese firms hoping to generate overseas and domestic buzz around its new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which began yesterday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese partake in family gatherings in their hometowns. The company, like rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), was caught off-guard by DeepSeek’s (深度求索) meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors worldwide were
RSS