Electronic design automation (EDA) specialist Synopsys has entered into a multi-year agreement with Amazon valued at more than $1bn, expanding its silicon intellectual property (IP) business into application-optimised solutions.
The deal positions Amazon as Synopsys’ lead customer for this new category of IP, which is intended to meet growing demand for silicon tailored to specific workloads.
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As part of the arrangement, Synopsys is transitioning to a licence-plus-royalty business model that is structured to benefit both companies as chip production volumes increase.
Amazon is said to have spent more than a decade investing in purpose-built semiconductors. Its portfolio includes Nitro chips for cloud security, networking and storage, Graviton processors for general-purpose computing, and Trainium chips designed for AI training and inference.
The new agreement builds on a relationship spanning more than 15 years and broadens Amazon’s use of Synopsys’ EDA software, simulation and analysis tools, and agentic AI technologies.
Amazon foundational AI, custom silicon and quantum computing senior vice president Peter DeSantis said: “Amazon has invested in custom silicon for more than a decade, and it has fundamentally changed what’s possible for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and our customers. From Graviton to Trainium, purpose-built chips deliver better performance at lower cost because they’re designed for exactly what customers need.
“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.”
Under the agreement, the two companies will work together to accelerate multiphysics solutions on Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton platforms. They also plan to apply AI across silicon-to-system engineering workflows, deploying Synopsys’ AI-powered EDA tools, physics-based simulation and agentic AI solutions.
Additionally, the collaboration will involve developing custom agentic AI capabilities to help Amazon’s engineering teams design, analyse, optimise and validate increasingly complex chips and systems.
Synopsys, for its part, will adopt Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), cloud storage services and Amazon Bedrock to speed up its own internal product development. The company plans to build and deploy AI applications and agents to support faster innovation across its offerings.
Synopsys president and CEO Sassine Ghazi said: “Special purpose silicon is at the heart of AWS innovation. As we expand into application-optimised IP solutions, we’re proud to have Amazon as our lead customer for this next phase of growth.
“More broadly, by combining Amazon’s leadership in AI infrastructure and custom silicon with Synopsys’ leadership in silicon IP, EDA and Multiphysics solutions, we can dramatically increase the productivity of our teams and shape the future of AI-native engineering.”
In a separate announcement, Synopsys disclosed a strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialised model optimised to use the former’s EDA tools to perform semiconductor design workflows.
The multi-year agreement encompasses a revenue-sharing arrangement and joint go-to-market strategy to make the model available to chip designers globally.
GPT-Synopsys will combine OpenAI’s frontier models with Synopsys’ EDA technology and deep domain expertise. This is expected to enable the model to reason about chip design and verification tasks and to operate Synopsys’ tools directly.
Engineers will be able to delegate objectives ranging from power, performance and area optimisation to timing and verification closure. AI agents will run tools, interpret results, make adjustments and iterate towards verified outcomes for human review.
The model will be hosted on OpenAI infrastructure and is designed to interoperate with customers’ existing agent harness systems while integrating with Synopsys.ai and the Synopsys Autopilot agentic AI platform. Early engagements with leading semiconductor companies are already under way.
The joint offering will bundle compute resources, model access and licences. Synopsys and OpenAI said the service would feature enterprise-grade security, governance and access controls, with customer design data encrypted at rest and in transit. Customer data will not be used to train the model and can be managed through configurable retention, audit and permission controls.
