Amazon's 'Titus' project reveals Nvidia's real power

11 hours ago 11

Dec 25, 1999; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Actor ANTHONY HOPKINS stars as Titus Andronicus in the Clear Blue Sky Productions film, 'Titus.'

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Ahead of Nvidia earnings later this week, I suggest you check out an Amazon AI project. The codename is Titus and it reveals Nvidia's true power.

The cloud giant says it's named after the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who completed the Colosseum, one of history's earliest examples of gigantic modular architecture. The Colosseum's repeating, self-supporting arches enabled rapid construction and scalable design, concepts Amazon wants to apply to next-generation AI data centers.

That's the official explanation. But the name carries deeper resonance. Like the Shakespearean general, Titus Andronicus, Amazon faces a dangerous balancing act between loyalty and self-preservation.

Business Insider's Eugene Kim revealed that "Titus" is an initiative to future-proof Amazon data centers for Nvidia's coming wave of monster GPU systems, including GB200 racks and beyond. Internal documents show Amazon redesigning power systems, liquid cooling, server layouts, and deployment timelines around Nvidia's increasingly demanding hardware requirements.

That's notable because Amazon has been loudly promoting its in-house AI chips, Trainium, as an alternative to Nvidia. That suggests AWS is steadily reducing dependence on Nvidia's ecosystem.

But the Titus project tells a different story. At the AI infrastructure level, where hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, Nvidia still dictates the future architecture of the cloud in the AI era. AWS may be developing its own chips, but it's still building the empire around Nvidia's roadmap.

There's an almost biblical interpretation here: Amazon as Titus, a trusted disciple helping carry forward the gospel according to St. Paul — in this case, Jensen Huang and Nvidia.

But Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus offers a more nuanced reading. In the play, Titus destroys himself through rigid loyalty to Rome, honoring institutional power so completely that he loses independence, flexibility, and eventually, everything else.

Amazon likely understands that risk. Trainium increasingly looks less like a rebellion against Nvidia than a strategic hedge against over-obedience. AWS may respect Rome's power. But it does not want to be consumed by it.

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Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up here. Before that, he was BI's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2007 for coverage of short selling and was a finalist in 2013 for scoops on the Facebook IPO. More recently, he won a 2024 San Francisco Press Club award for commentary. Got a tip? Reach out using the secure messaging app Signal (+1 415-341-4927) or via email on [email protected].ExpertiseAlistair oversees all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including generative AI, large language models, cloud computing, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.Popular StoriesArtificial Intelligence:It's getting harder to make big leaps at the frontier of AIOpenAI's AI-adjusted earnings numbers have echoes of Groupon and WeWorkDeath by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI worldCloud computing:Amazon dominated the first cloud era. The AI boom has kicked off Cloud 2.0, and the company doesn't have a head start this time.In cloud, there's AI (which is hot) and everything else (which is not)Chips:Why Intel is still so important: Real countries have fabsApple's made-in-the-USA chips signal a turnaround for the US's big semiconductor betEVs and Tesla:Tesla's AI supercomputer has a Silicon Valley town rushing to meet surging electricity demandTesla's Cybertruck is outselling almost every other EV in the USOnline Search:Google is losing its status as a verbA simple way to fix search: Bright pink ads