Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
Register for Acceleration Economy’s Cloud Wars CEO Outlook 2024 Course, now available. Featuring exclusive interviews on strategy, AI, and customers with the CEOs of Cloud Wars Top 10 companies.
In today’s minute, I explore the evolving chessboard of AI partnerships with a focus on Amazon’s recent deal with Anthropic.
Highlights
00:31 — Recently, it came to light that both Google and Amazon have made massive investments into a very hot GenAI company called Anthropic, which makes AI models. We’re going to see this as a lot of the different Cloud Wars Top 10 try to form partnerships. Maybe we’ll even see some acquisitions with these very hot, powerful GenAI startups.
01:26 — Amazon has put a total of $4 billion into Anthropic. I think what we see here is AWS, in return for that big investment, gets the title of the primary cloud provider we talked about late last week. That’s a nice designation for it to have. I’m sure Anthropic, with that, will push a lot of business over to AWS, which AWS needs to try to get its growth rate back up.
02:28 — Google Cloud has the advantage still with GenAI: a massive, organized, unified GenAI portfolio; the security it’s tied in; its overall notion of the model garden. It’s starting to pull all its assets and like BigQuery, giving them GenAI possibilities. It’s got a remarkable AI ecosystem over Google Cloud. It’s how it’s worked for a long time, something AWS is playing catch up on.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
03:31 — So good for AWS. It’s doing what it needs to. I don’t think you can look at this as a win-lose AWS versus Google Cloud. Google Cloud is, along with its model garden philosophy, keeping things very open. Anthropic is a hot company. And Google Cloud, I think, wisely wants to be part of that.
04:09 — We’ll see lots of these back-and-forths. All these advantages will play out clearly for customers because they’re going to get incredible capabilities. We see all the things Microsoft is doing with OpenAI; Oracle, on its own, plus with Cohere and others; SAP has invested in Cohere, Anthropic, and Aleph Alpha. ServiceNow has been very aggressive on this front.
04:50 — It’s a great thing for the industry and the infusion of new capabilities. Biggest of all, though, is that what the industry is doing is rapidly going to transform into new business outcome possibilities for customers.
