Amazon to Sell Its Own Brand of Chips Next to Wipes, USB Cables - Bloomberg Business

Perhaps a few big assumptions in this article, based on the Amazon/Annapurna press release, but still an interesting Internet-retailer-of-everything development

"Amazon agreed to acquire Annapurna Labs in January 2015. The Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit is hiring semiconductor engineers to add to its own capabilities and is increasingly seeking to design or tweak its own hardware. While the Seattle-based Web retailer is a storefront for merchandise from a plethora of manufacturers, it has branched out to offer commoditized products under its own brand. The Annapurna chips aren’t yet available directly from Amazon’s main e-retail website.
Annapurna Labs’s Alpine semiconductors aren’t targeted at the sort of high-end servers that support Intel’s business, and instead are designed for devices that nibble at the edge of this market, such as low-power computers for storage and networking. Companies such as Synology America Corp., Netgear Inc., Asustek Computer Inc. and others are building products that use Annapurna’s technology, the company said in the release. Annapurna will also sell a hardware development kit, which lets its customers modify and extend its chips for their own purposes."

Amazon to Sell Its Own Brand of Chips Next to Wipes, USB Cables - Bloomberg Business