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Amazon and Synopsys ink multi-year billion-dollar deal in multi-year IP agreement to accelerate AI chip design efforts
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Amazon and chip design tool maker Synopsys are entering a multi-year deal, said to be worth over a billion dollars, in which the two companies will deepen their cooperation on AI chip design, while better optimizing their tools for one another's services. As part of the deal, Amazon will license Synopsys' IP and expand its use of Synopsys' electronic design automation (EDA) software tools for AI chip design and agentic AI technologies.
The deal goes both ways. From its side of the equation, Synopsys will work with Amazon to optimize its multiphysics solutions for Amazon Trainium and Graviton chips, will adopt AWS cloud computing and storage services, and will begin using Amazon Bedrock to build and deploy AI applications and agents for its own development work.
Although there's clearly some element of cooperative back-scratching with this deal, Synopsys and its competitors are moving towards automating ever greater portions of the chip design process. Amazon ensuring that process is optimized for Amazon hardware places it in a much more favorable position in a world where chip design is easier and faster. Especially with many of the major AI companies looking to develop their own inferencing hardware to ease costs from pricey Nvidia GPUs.
Many of the major AI developments in 2026 have centered around the use of AI agents, leading to hardware shortages and a race to fill that gap with optimized hardware. The Synopsys/Amazon deal could put both companies in a position to take advantage of that, designing and developing new AI hardware, while better integration could benefit customers using both companies' services and components.
The core of the deal, however, is in chip design collaboration. Amazon will expand its use of Synopsys' designs to include blueprints of application-optimized IP: silicon designs that it can incorporate into its own chips. It will also take advantage of Synopsys' AI-powered engineering software to accelerate its development of custom AI chips and AWS infrastructure hardware.
Considering Amazon already markets its Graviton 5 for CPU-intensive agentic AI workloads, accelerating the development of next-generation designs could help further cement Amazon's position as it looks to compete with Nvidia on AI data center deployment.
In the announcement, Amazon also cites its Trainium chips for AI training, and Nitro for cloud security, networking, and storage, suggesting the collaboration between the two companies could augment multiple chip lines.
Taking a step back from the chip design process, this deal will also see Amazon and Synopsys collaborate on better applying AI within their own workflows, optimizing the silicon-to-system process to make chip design faster and more efficient. Amazon will deploy Synopsys' AI-powered EDA, physics-based simulations, and agentic AI solutions to improve the capabilities of its engineering teams. The companies claim this will help them design, analyze, optimize, and validate new chip designs more efficiently.
"As our chip designs grow more ambitious and AI reshapes the engineering process itself, Synopsys helps us move faster across the design cycle, helping us deliver more capable, efficient computing for customers worldwide," said Amazon SVP Peter DeSantis in a joint press release.