By Robbie Whelan

Amazon Web Services has signed up cloud storage company Snowflake as its latest chips customer, as the proliferation of artificial intelligence agents continues to drive high levels of demand for computing hardware.

Snowflake plans to pay $6 billion over the next five years for access to Amazon's Graviton chips inside AWS data centers. Graviton, which AWS released in 2018, is a central processing unit, or CPU -- the main computer brains that power everything from personal devices like smartphones and laptops to car computers, data center servers and advanced AI systems.

The deal will make Snowflake one of AWS's largest customers for CPU-based computing. Other major buyers of Graviton chips include Meta Platforms and Apple. AWS also offers chips customized from training and running AI models.

Shares in Snowflake soared 30% after the market closed.

Snowflake was founded on AWS's platform in 2015 and has been expanding its relationship with Amazon ever since. The company has nearly 14,000 customers, including rewards and advertising startup Fetch and AI analytics platform Hex.

As AI agents, which are autonomous bots that can perform a variety of jobs for human users, have grown more popular, demand for CPUs has surged, in part because agents require a large number of the processors to help them orchestrate computing tasks, or arrange them in the proper order. Companies that sell CPUs, including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Arm Holdings, have seen their share prices rise and sales flourish in recent months as agentic AI has expanded.

Updates to follow as news develops.

Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 27, 2026 16:25 ET (20:25 GMT)

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