How Amazon went from an AI also-ran to a real contender
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.SEATTLE—Not long ago, Amazon was seen as an also-ran in the great AI race.Microsoft, in particular—with its partnership with OpenAI and cloud business outpacing Amazon’s AWS—seemed to have reclaimed its place as the Puget Sound’s reigning tech giant.Things are looking much different for AWS today.That’s thanks to some savvy deals of its own with OpenAI and Anthropic, plans for $200 billion of infrastructure spending and Amazon’s long-term bet on custom chips. It’s also not involved in the ugly tech trial of the year sucking in the biggest names in AI, from Elon Musk and Sam Altman to Mira Murati and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.“People thought we were behind,” Matt Garman, head of Amazon’s cloud-computing business, AWS, told me in an interview here on the corporate campus.
“As we’ve progressed, they’ve seen our strategies start to evolve, and they’ve started to see other people realize that that strategy has a lot of merit.”Along the way, as the cloud business progressed from a side project to a major part of Amazon’s business, companies stopped asking why they should turn their computing needs over to a bookseller.The current moment was helped by a decision made more than a decade ago to acquire Annapurna Labs to begin designing chips for AWS’s cloud-computing needs—the goal being lower cost and using less energy.That effort developed a chip called Graviton that handles traditional CPU needs, and Trainium for AI. Both are useful for inference, the next phase of AI compute needs.
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