Content: Analysis

Is custom storage silicon the next evolution for cloud hyper-scale platforms?

Chris Evans

07 Jan 2026 — 7 min read

Ten years ago in 2015, Amazon Web Services (AWS) acquired a small Israeli company called Annapurna Labs. Its technology had been used to develop Nitro, the beginning of a series of custom silicon designs that started with I/O offload and evolved into custom Arm processors. As demand for storage in the public cloud increases, could the next step for AWS and other hyper-scale cloud platforms be the acquisition of SSD/HDD controller technology to build custom storage? If so, who could be a target?

Background

The Nitro ecosystem was developed by AWS in the mid-2010s as a way to offload specific I/O and security functionality within EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Nitro provides two main benefits:

It moves the control of I/O and networking functionality to hardware controlled by AWS. Irrespective of the host settings, network routing and the provision of storage is managed by AWS, enabling the customer to have full control over the EC2 guest operating system.
Offloading virtualised features from the O/S enables the ability to increase the efficiency of the virtualisation implementation, delivering more resources to the customer (which they pay for).

An additional benefit is the option to run alternative hypervisors on AWS EC2 hardware, which is exactly how AWS implemented VMware on AWS (the vSphere ecosystem and ESX hypervisor). We discuss Nitro in more detail in this article from 2019.

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