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You might think Amazon\u2019s biggest swing in the AI race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS has also been building in-house foundation models, new chips, massive data centers, and agents meant to keep enterprise customers locked inside its ecosystem. The company believes these offerings will give it an edge as businesses of all shapes and sizes deploy AI in the real world.<\/p>\n
WIRED sat down with AWS CEO Matt Garman ahead of the company\u2019s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to discuss his AI vision, and how he plans to extend Amazon\u2019s lead in the cloud market over its fast-rising competitors, Microsoft and Google.<\/p>\n
Garman is betting that AI is a service that AWS can deliver more cheaply and reliably than its rivals. Through Bedrock, Amazon\u2019s platform for building AI apps, he says customers can access a variety of AI foundation models while keeping the familiar data controls, security layers, and reliability that AWS is known for. If that pitch holds up, it could help AWS dominate in the AI era.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo years ago, people were building AI applications. Now, people are building applications that have AI in<\/em> them,\u201d said Garman, arguing that AI is becoming a feature inside large products rather than a standalone experiment. \u201cThat’s the platform that we’ve built, and that’s where I think you see AWS really start to take the lead.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the announcements at this year\u2019s re:Invent fall along these lines. Amazon unveiled new, cost-efficient AI models in its Nova series; agents that can work autonomously on software development and cybersecurity tasks; as well as a fresh offering, Forge, that lets enterprises cheaply train AI models on their own data.<\/p>\n The stakes are high for AWS to get this right. While Amazon\u2019s cloud unit dominated the smartphone era, smaller rivals like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have grown at higher rates since the arrival of ChatGPT. Microsoft and Google have surged by tightly integrating with frontier AI models\u2014the technology underlying ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively\u2014attracting enterprises eager to experiment with cutting-edge capabilities.<\/p>\n This rise of AWS\u2019s rivals has raised questions about Amazon\u2019s broader AI strategy, and how the incumbent will fare in the years to come.<\/p>\n Garman says he\u2019s been hearing these concerns for years, but less so in recent months. He argues that the tide is turning, pointing to AWS\u2019s stronger-than-expected results in the company\u2019s third quarter as evidence that his strategy is working.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n