As the Cloud Wars Top 10 race to seamlessly fuse their cloud services with new GenAI capabilities, “tens of thousands” of businesses are using Amazon Bedrock to build “high-quality, cost-effective, low-latency, production-grade generative AI applications,” according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Given the level of excitement and investment the GenAI Revolution has triggered among enterprises, I would not have been surprised to hear Jassy say that Bedrock now has thousands of customers — but “tens of thousands” is an indication of phenomenal momentum.
It’s also a major factor within Jassy’s assertion that “we have a multibillion-dollar revenue run-rate that we see in AI already, and it’s still relatively early days.” So it would appear that Bedrock — an AWS managed service that helps developers build GenAI apps in concert with leading foundation models — is playing a major role in driving that steep growth opportunity for AWS.
Before I share a fairly long comment from Jassy that puts the Bedrock momentum in full context, a quick bit of background: Jassy made these comments a couple of months ago on Amazon’s Q1 earnings call, during which the big takeaway for me was AWS’s growth rate climbing to 17.2% as AWS revenue reached $25 billion for the quarter.
I was researching a piece on my Q2 outlook for Amazon that I’ll post later this week and, as part of that effort, was reviewing Jassy’s comments from the Q1 earnings call. That’s when I came across Jassy’s point about Bedrock having “tens of thousands” of customers, a telling detail that I’m ashamed to say I did not notice when I first reviewed the Amazon Q1 transcript in early May. (And I promise that, in atoning for that transgression, an appropriate degree of self-flagellation has been administered!)
So here’s the relevant excerpt from Jassy’s Q1 earnings-call comments that puts the Bedrock surprise in a richer context of AWS’s overall AI efforts and achievements.
“We’re seeing very significant momentum in people trying to figure out how to run their generative AI on top of AWS. I mentioned we have a multibillion-dollar revenue run-rate that we see in AI already, and it’s still relatively early days. And I think at a high level, there’s a few things that we’re seeing that’s driving that growth,” Jassy said.
“First of all, there are so many companies that are still building their models…. And a lot of those are being built on top of AWS, and I expect an increasing amount of those to be built on AWS over time because of our operational performance and security, as well as our chips, both what we offer and those from NVIDIA,” Jassy said.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
“I think the thing that people sometimes don’t realize is that while we’re in the stage that so many companies are spending money training models … you spend much more in inference than you do in training because you train only periodically, but you’re spinning out predictions and inferences all the time,” Jassy said.
“So we also see quite a few companies building their generative AI applications to do inferencing on top of AWS, and a lot of that has to do with the services. And the primary example we see there is how many companies — tens of thousands of companies — already are building on top of Amazon Bedrock, which has the largest selection of large language models around and a set of features that make it so much easier to build high-quality, cost-effective, low latency, production-grade generative AI applications,” Jassy said.
“So, we see both training and inference being really big drivers on top of AWS. And then you layer on top of that the fact that for so many companies, their models and these generative AI applications are going to have their most-sensitive assets and data. And it’s going to matter a lot to them what kind of security they get around those applications.”
Jassy then took a direct swipe at Microsoft and the security nightmares it’s been experiencing, which I’ve chronicled extensively — most recently in “Microsoft Security Takes Another Beating As Google Cloud Showcases Microsoft’s Vulnerabilities” and “Can Satya Nadella Repair Microsoft’s Badly Broken Security Culture?“
“And yes, if you just pay attention to what’s been happening over the last year or two, not all the providers have the same track record,” Jassy said.
“And we have a meaningful edge on the AWS side so that as companies are now getting into the phase of seriously experimenting and then actually deploying these applications to production, people want to run their generative AI on top of AWS.”
Final Thought
Please bear in mind that Jassy’s comment about Bedrock having “tens of thousands” of customers was made two months ago — so by now there are likely many more, perhaps even some tens of thousands more.
