AWS CEO Matt Garman Wants to Reassert Amazon’s Cloud Dominance in the AI Era

You might think that Amazon’s biggest jump in the AI ​​race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS is also building an in-house foundation model, 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.

WIRED sat down with AWS CEO Matt Garman ahead of the company’s annual Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to discuss his AI vision and how he plans to increase Amazon’s lead in the cloud market over its fast-rising competitors, Microsoft and Google.

Garman is betting that AI is a service that AWS can provide more cheaply and reliably than its competitors. Through Bedrock, Amazon’s platform for building AI apps, he says customers can access different AI foundation models while maintaining the familiar data controls, security layers, and reliability that AWS is known for. If that pitch holds up, it could help AWS dominate the AI ​​age.

“Two years ago, people were building AI applications. Now, people are building applications that have AI In Them,” Garman said, arguing that AI is becoming a feature inside larger products rather than a standalone experiment. “It’s the platform that we’ve built, and I think that’s where you see AWS really start to take the lead.”

Many announcements at this year’s Re:Invent have been made on this basis. Amazon unveils new, cost-efficient AI models in its Nova series; agents that can work autonomously on software development and cybersecurity tasks; As well as a new offering, Forge, which lets enterprises inexpensively train AI models on their own data.

It’s a huge risk for AWS to get this right. While Amazon’s cloud unit dominated the smartphone era, smaller rivals like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have grown at a higher rate since the arrival of ChatGate. Microsoft and Google have made progress by tightly integrating with frontier AI models—the underlying technology of ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively—which are attracting enterprises eager to experiment with cutting-edge capabilities.

This rise from AWS’s rivals has raised questions about Amazon’s broader AI strategy and how the incumbent company will fare in the coming years.

Garman says he’s been hearing these concerns for years, but less so in recent months. They argue that the situation is changing, pointing to AWS’s stronger-than-expected results in the company’s third quarter as evidence that their strategy is working.