Winning in AI is now defined as having a great chat app, not the AI infrastructure running that app. Amazon (AWS) has no chat app (that I know of, which is the point!), so people don’t think they’re winning. If AWS did have an app, and evolved it as a product, they would be at the AI table.
It doesn’t matter that AWS might have the “picks and shovels.” That’s not where the definitional power and attention and leaderboard is.
Analogously, Dell doesn’t define much at all (anything?) in the market despite how many apps and workloads run on Dell laptops, servers, etc. Neither does Cisco, etc.
In new, all-consuming tech categories, like AI, you have to chase the use case, deliver apps for it, and constantly churn out new features. And in AI, that’s currently a chat app.
In contrast to AWS, look at Google. If Google didn’t have Gemini Chat, NotebookLM, Nano Banana…we wouldn’t think they were “winning"AI.
If Amazon bought Anthropic, they’d have the chat apps, Claude code, and a customer base. Then they’d rocket up the leaderboard, probably third after OpenAI and Google. It’d go back and forth between Google and AWSthropic each quarter. Then we’d be saying Microsoft missed the AI boat instead of Amazon. Someone always has to be forth.
Amazon is an anthropic investor and put in $8bn. They say it’s a “minority investment.” ChatGPT thinks that might mean they own 15% to 19%. Google put in “more than $3bn” and has something like a 14% stake. FTX (the bitcoin blow-up) had invested $500m, but sold off for a profit “with the largest stake going to ATIC Third International Investment Co., an enterprise aligned with Mubadala, a sovereign wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates.”