Ahead of Nvidia earnings later this week, I suggest you check out an Amazon AI project. The codename is Titus and it reveals Nvidia’s true power.
The cloud giant says it’s named after the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who completed the Colosseum, one of history’s earliest examples of gigantic modular architecture. The Colosseum’s repeating, self-supporting arches enabled rapid construction and scalable design, concepts Amazon wants to apply to next-generation AI data centers.
That’s the official explanation. But the name carries deeper resonance. Like the Shakespearean general, Titus Andronicus, Amazon faces a dangerous balancing act between loyalty and self-preservation.
Business Insider’s Eugene Kim revealed that “Titus” is an initiative to future-proof Amazon data centers for Nvidia’s coming wave of monster GPU systems, including GB200 racks and beyond. Internal documents show Amazon redesigning power systems, liquid cooling, server layouts, and deployment timelines around Nvidia’s increasingly demanding hardware requirements.
That’s notable because Amazon has been loudly promoting its in-house AI chips, Trainium, as an alternative to Nvidia. That suggests AWS is steadily reducing dependence on Nvidia’s ecosystem.
But the Titus project tells a different story. At the AI infrastructure level, where hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, Nvidia still dictates the future architecture of the cloud in the AI era. AWS may be developing its own chips, but it’s still building the empire around Nvidia’s roadmap.
There’s an almost biblical interpretation here: Amazon as Titus, a trusted disciple helping carry forward the gospel according to St. Paul — in this case, Jensen Huang and Nvidia.
But Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus offers a more nuanced reading. In the play, Titus destroys himself through rigid loyalty to Rome, honoring institutional power so completely that he loses independence, flexibility, and eventually, everything else.
Amazon likely understands that risk. Trainium increasingly looks less like a rebellion against Nvidia than a strategic hedge against over-obedience. AWS may respect Rome’s power. But it does not want to be consumed by it.
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