Speaking at the HumanX conference held in San Francisco from September 6 - 4, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO - Mr. Matt Garman - emphasized that AWS has long been accustomed to both cooperating and competing with its own partners.
He said that Amazon recently poured up to 50 billion USD into OpenAI, in addition to a long-term cooperation relationship with Anthropic, an AI startup that Amazon has invested about 8 billion USD in.
According to Garman, working with two directly competing AI companies is not a problem.
AWS both cooperates with partners and develops competitive products, but the principle is not to create any unfair advantages for itself," he said.
AWS was launched in 2006 in the context of not being able to build the entire cloud service ecosystem on its own. Therefore, they were forced to cooperate with many technology partners, while accepting direct future competition.
Mr. Matt Garman - who joined Amazon in 2005 - said that this philosophy has become AWS's "DNA". Instead of avoiding conflicts of interest, the company establishes a principle of transparent competition with partners.
In fact, this model is no longer unfamiliar. Amazon has long provided a platform for sellers and directly competed with them with its own products. In the cloud sector, even competitors like Oracle also provide services on AWS.
In the context of artificial intelligence booming, multi-party investment has become a trend. When Anthropic announced a 30 billion USD funding round in February, many participating investors also simultaneously poured capital into OpenAI, including Microsoft, which is a major partner of OpenAI.
For AWS, bringing leading AI models to its platform is vital, especially when Microsoft has deeply integrated these models into the Azure ecosystem.
Not stopping there, cloud companies also develop "AI model routing" services, allowing customers to choose models suitable for each task.
For example, a model is used for planning, another model for reasoning, and a low-cost model for simple tasks such as automatically completing code.
According to Garman, this will be an inevitable trend: "The world will operate in the direction of using many different models to optimize performance and cost.
Amazon's strategy also reflects how technology giants are operating: both investing in partners and developing their own technology to compete directly.
This creates a complex ecosystem where the boundary between allies and opponents is increasingly blurred.
In the AI race, traditional loyalty is almost no longer the decisive factor. Instead, the ability to utilize multiple resources at the same time is the key to maintaining position.
As Garman affirmed, in the current world of artificial intelligence, competition and cooperation do not exclude each other, but go hand in hand as an inevitable part of the game.
