Amazon Prepares to Go ‘Toe to Toe’ With Nvidia in AI Hardware

In a bland north Austin neighborhood dominated by anonymous corporate office towers, Amazon.com Inc. engineers are toiling away on one of the tech industry’s most ambitious moonshots: loosening Nvidia Corp.’s grip on the $100-billion-plus market for artificial intelligence chips.

Amazon’s utilitarian engineering lab contains rows of long work benches overlooking the Texas capital’s mushrooming suburbs. The place is kind of a mess. Printed circuit boards, cooling fans, cables and networking gear are strewn around workstations in various states of assembly, some muddied with the thermal paste used to connect chips to the components that keep them from overheating. There’s a bootstrapping vibe you’d expect to see at a startup not a company with a ...