In a bland north Austin neighborhood dominated by anonymous office towers, Amazon.com Inc. Engineers are hard at work on one of the tech industry’s most ambitious projects: loosening Nvidia Corp.’s grip. in the more than $100 billion market for artificial intelligence chips.
Amazon’s Utility Engineering Lab contains rows of long work benches overlooking the Texas capital’s booming suburbs. The place is a bit messy. Circuit boards, cooling fans, cables and networking equipment are scattered around workstations in various states of assembly, some muddied by thermal paste used to connect chips to components that keep them from overheating. There’s a bootstrap vibe that you’d expect to see in a startup and not a company with a market cap of over $2 trillion.