In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dissect Amazon’s game-changing $4 billion investment in Anthropic, shedding light on its potential to rejuvenate AWS’ growth.
Highlights
00:23 — I thought that Amazon scored a huge win with its recent, extended partnership with Anthropic. I think it’s going to look back at this and say the $4 billion investment was one of the best bargains that Amazon has ever come across.
01:42 — It will touch the slow growth that AWS has had over the last two or three years, reverse that. Last quarter it went up from 12% growth to 13%. This gives AWS an opportunity to reaccelerate that growth engine; it is growing much less, much more slowly than Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Oracle.
02:18 — This gives AWS more enterprise software chops. AWS has been more on the compute infrastructure side. Clearly, it has some things in software. Anthropic brings lots more cred in that area as well as in the explosive new GenAI area. Rightly or wrongly, AWS is perceived as lagging behind the other big hyperscalers.
02:57 — It’s got a huge cloud infrastructure customer; that should help boost the revenue. Plus, there’s a new emergence of a big trend in the place where cloud and AI overlap, the AI ecosystem. It’s not just the power of one big vendor, but the collection of partnerships and alliances that these big companies are able to strike. It gives it momentum in that.
03:56 — At Acceleration Economy, this AI ecosystem is near and dear to our hearts. Later this year, we will be putting on an event called the AI Ecosystem Summit. We’re looking forward to it as a place that displays the whole notion of how two or more of these big tech vendors working together across the different layers of the ecosystem can create innovation more quickly and have a higher impact than ever before.
04:29 — The other factor that plays into that is that customers are clearly a huge player in this. As these customers rapidly gain new capabilities, skills, and insights around GenA, they’re going to become a creator feeding into this AI ecosystem. It’s a really powerful dynamic.
