AWS CEO Matt Garman said at the HumanX conference in San Francisco that Amazon’s $50B investment in OpenAI, alongside its existing $8B investment in Anthropic, mirrors the same dynamic AWS has managed since its earliest days of partnering with companies it also competes against, including Oracle, which sells its database products on AWS. Garman framed the OpenAI investment as nearly unavoidable, noting that both models were already available on Microsoft Azure, AWS’s biggest rival, making access to OpenAI’s models a competitive necessity. Amazon is not alone in the practice, as Anthropic’s $30B February funding round included at least a dozen investors also backing OpenAI, among them Microsoft.
