Amazon has become increasingly aggressive in the artificial intelligence race, arguing that its cloud division has already reached a size and breadth that rivals, and in some cases exceeds, that of its competitors.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call that AI is the fastest-growing technology the company has ever encountered, and identified Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a core beneficiary of that rapid growth.
To highlight the pace of growth, Jassy made a clear comparison. Three years after AWS launched, AWS’ revenue reached $58 million. In contrast, in the first three years of the current AI wave, AWS’ AI business grew to more than $15 billion in annual revenue, nearly 260 times its size.
The company attributes this momentum to its combination of infrastructure, software tools, and partnerships aimed at making AWS a one-stop shop for companies building AI systems.
A key pillar is a set of development tools. AWS’s SageMaker platform is designed for training machine learning models, and the company says it can reduce training time by up to 40%. Meanwhile, the company’s Bedrock service, which provides access to a variety of advanced AI models, saw customer spending increase 170% quarter-over-quarter and processed more tokens in the most recent quarter than in all previous years combined.
In a notable move, Amazon is deepening its relationship with OpenAI and adding OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 model to Bedrock, with further updates expected. The company is also introducing Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI, to help companies build so-called “agent” AI systems, or software that can autonomously perform large-scale tasks.
Jassy argued that such agents will account for much of the value created by AI in the coming years. AWS customers can already build these systems using their own data through the Strands platform. The Strands platform has been downloaded more than 25 million times, and downloads have tripled quarter-over-quarter. With deployment tools like AgentCore, new agents can now be deployed every 10 seconds, he added.
Amazon also promotes pre-built applications designed to automate routine business functions. The company says its tools – Kiro for coding, Transform for software migration, Connect for operations and Quick for knowledge work – are gaining traction. In particular, the Quick platform expanded rapidly, with new user numbers quadrupling quarter-on-quarter. The newly released desktop version integrates with everyday workplace tools, allowing users to summarize communications, capture information, and automate tasks.
Beyond software, Amazon is investing heavily in the hardware that powers AI. The company’s custom chip business grew nearly 40% sequentially in the first quarter, reflecting increased demand for specialized infrastructure needed to train and run large-scale AI models.
Still, Jassy emphasized that the benefits of AWS extend beyond individual products. He said many companies prefer to run their AI systems close to where their data already resides, and much of that data is already stored within AWS. As customers deepen their use of AI, they also adopt additional services from storage and databases to analytics and security, strengthening AWS’s position as a comprehensive cloud platform.
Jassy added that security and reliability remain another selling point, noting that startups, large enterprises, and governments continue to rely on AWS for mission-critical workloads.
Taken together, this strategy reflects Amazon’s broader ambitions. This means not only participating in the AI boom, but also making AI entrenched within the existing cloud ecosystem, ensuring that as artificial intelligence expands, so does the reach of AWS.
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