Amazon and Synopsys have entered a multi-year, billion-dollar intellectual property agreement aimed at speeding up custom AI chip design, the two companies announced. Under the deal, Amazon will expand its use of Synopsys chip blueprints, including application-optimized IP it can build into its own silicon, and will adopt Synopsys AI-powered engineering software. Synopsys, in turn, will run more of its own development on Amazon Web Services.
The collaboration touches several Amazon chip lines. Amazon cited its Trainium chips for AI training, its Graviton processors, and Nitro for cloud security, networking, and storage as targets for the work. Amazon already markets Graviton 5 for CPU-intensive agentic AI workloads, and faster development of next-generation designs could strengthen its position as it competes with Nvidia in AI data center deployment.
Amazon will deploy Synopsys AI-powered electronic design automation, physics-based simulations, and agentic AI solutions to help its engineering teams design, analyze, optimize, and validate new chips more efficiently. The two companies also plan to jointly apply AI within their own workflows to speed the silicon-to-system process. Amazon senior vice president Peter DeSantis said that as Amazon's chip designs grow more ambitious and AI reshapes engineering itself, Synopsys helps the company move faster through the design cycle and deliver more capable, efficient computing to customers worldwide.
The arrangement runs in both directions. Synopsys will work with Amazon to optimize its multiphysics solutions for Trainium and Graviton chips, will adopt AWS cloud computing and storage services, and will use Amazon Bedrock to build and deploy AI applications and agents for its own development work. That embeds Amazon cloud and AI tools further in Synopsys engineering workflows while Synopsys IP becomes more deeply integrated into Amazon custom silicon.
For Synopsys, the IP agreement introduces a license-plus-royalty model, so royalty revenue could scale as production volume rises. With Amazon as the lead customer for its application-optimized IP, Synopsys gains a reference for pitching its chip design blueprints and integrated AI-powered tools to other chip developers. Synopsys and competitors Cadence and Siemens are all pushing toward faster, more autonomous chip design, which could shorten the typical design cycle for new enterprise hardware.
For Amazon, the partnership extends beyond its own chips, potentially strengthening the case for AWS services through optimized Synopsys tools. Faster design does not guarantee better chips or a shorter time to market, and neither company has announced a timeline for new chip development. Both firms will need to demonstrate the partnership's effectiveness before the billion-dollar figure can be measured.
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