Amazon · Trainium · Layer 2
AWS Trainium 2
The generation currently at widest availability across AWS regions.
cloud only Cannot be bought. Exists only inside one cloud, so choosing it is choosing that cloud.
Specifications
- Memory
- Not published in directly comparable terms
- Bandwidth
- Not published
- Compute
- Below Trainium 3
- Power
- Not published
- Interconnect
- NeuronLink
- Software
- AWS Neuron SDK
- Form factor
- accelerator
- Workload
- both
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The catch
Same AWS lock-in, and region availability is often the real constraint rather than the chip.
The economics
Cheaper per hour than Trainium 3 and frequently the better value for inference that does not need the newer part.
Cost per million tokens is the metric that decides most real purchases, and there is no neutral benchmark for it — every published figure comes from a company selling one side of the comparison. Read all of them, ours included, as claims rather than measurements.
The power question underneath this
A rack of frontier accelerators draws 120–200 kW against a 2026 average of about 27 kW, and the US grid interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with waits approaching five years. Whether you can energise this part is now a harder question than whether you can buy it.
Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue · Rack power density · Tokens per watt
Where you actually rent this
Choosing the part is the easy half. The same accelerator rents for wildly different money depending only on who you rent it from — the cheapest and dearest published on-demand price for an H100 sit 5.6× apart — and the provider, not the chip, is what decides whether you can leave later.
Compared against
- AWS Trainium 2 vs AWS Trainium 3 — Region availability against raw capability. On AWS the older part is often the one you can actually get.Compare with AWS Trainium 3
Related silicon
- AWS Trainium 3 — 144 GB HBM3e per chip, cloud only
- AWS Inferentia 2 — Not published in directly comparable terms, cloud only
- Google TPU v6e (Trillium) — Not published in directly comparable terms, cloud only
- Microsoft Maia 200 — Not published, cloud only
- AMD Helios (Instinct MI455X) — 31 TB of HBM4 per rack across 72 MI455X GPUs; 432 GB of HBM4 per GPU., rent
- AMD Instinct MI300X — 192 GB HBM3, rent
Want this whole layer as one table?
The accelerators on these pages as a single CSV — memory, bandwidth, compute, power, interconnect, software stack, availability, who each part is for and the catch — ready to sort, filter or load into a notebook.
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