Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially activated its Project Rainier supercluster of Trainium2 chips.

According to a blog post from AWS, the cluster is now fully operational, with nearly 500,000 of the home-developed Trainium2 chips.

Project Rainier was developed for AI company Anthropic for its AI model Claude. By the end of the year, the aim is to have more than one million Trainium2 chips for Claude to run on for both training and inference workloads.

AWS detailed the Rainier cluster earlier this year. First announced during the Re:Invent event in Las Vegas in late 2024, Project Rainier is comprised of Trainium2 UltraServers containing "hundreds of thousands" of Trainium2 chips interconnected with third-generation, low-latency petabit-scale EFA networking, spread across multiple data centers.

An UltraServer combines four physical Trainium2 servers, each with 16 Trainium2 chips.

Among those data center locations is St. Joseph County, Indiana, for which AWS is investing $11bn in the site, having broken ground in October 2024.

“Project Rainier is one of AWS’s most ambitious undertakings to date,” said Ron Diamant, an AWS distinguished engineer and head architect of Trainium. “It’s a massive, one-of-its-kind infrastructure project that will usher in the next generation of artificial intelligence models.”

According to AWS, the cluster is already 70 percent larger than any other AI computing platform in AWS history.

While Project Rainier is set to be used by Anthropic, the AI company is remaining agnostic in its hardware choices. Just this month, Anthropic expanded its contract with Google for a 1GW+ cloud deal that would see the AI company accessing up to one million of Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). It also uses Nvidia GPUs for training and inference.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees and directly competes with OpenAI through its Claude large language models. Amazon has invested some $8 billion into Anthropic. Earlier this year, the AI company was said to be raising some $5bn in a funding round that would value Anthropic at $170bn.