> Isn't it risky doing any customization since you don't get commodity pricing?

Depends on how many you order and how reasonable the customization is. Like, what if I wanted a 10,000 38 core Xeons with a 2.5GHz Base clock and 3.5GHz Turbo clock? Such a part doesn't exist, yet sits smack dab between two existing Models, the Xeon Platnium 8368 and 8368Q. Assuming yields are already good enough, that might be the sort of thing a CPU maker will do. (Might need more than 10k units though, IDK.)

I'd wager Pat doesn't get out of bed for 10k units and neither does Lisa.

At AWS scale you can feasibly just buy up the entire run of chips. What's a few million CPUs more or less between friends?

Additionally, Amazon is absolutely the type of company to create their own x86 processor if Intel/AMD are unwilling to make some customization.

Intel does not want to be competing with an Amazon Basics processor.

They already have pretty significant investment in their own ARM-based chips for servers. Given Apple's recent success in x86 emulation on ARM, I doubt it's worth the trouble of directly competing in the x86 arena.

You basically need a license for X86 from Intel for this. Do you think x86 is open source!

The usual line of operation is to include VIA in the operation.