AWS CEO Matt Garman declares AI agents will surpass the Internet as Amazon battles rivals

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

You might think Amazon's biggest swing in the AI race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS has also been building in-house foundation models, 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 extend 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 deliver more cheaply and reliably than its rivals. Through Bedrock, Amazon's platform for building AI apps, he says customers can access a variety of AI foundation models while keeping the familiar data controls, security layers, and reliability that AWS is known for. If that pitch holds up, it could help AWS dominate in the AI era. "Two years ago, people were building AI applications. Now, people are building applications that have AI in them," said Garman, arguing that AI is becoming a feature inside large products rather than a standalone experiment. "That's the platform that we've built, and that's where I think you see AWS really start to take the lead." Many of the announcements at this year's re:Invent fall along these lines. Amazon unveiled new, cost-efficient AI models in its Nova series; agents that can work autonomously on software development and cybersecurity tasks; as well as a fresh offering, Forge, that lets enterprises cheaply train AI models on their own data. The stakes are high 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 higher rates since the arrival of ChatGPT. Microsoft and Google have surged by tightly integrating with frontier AI models -- the technology underlying ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively -- attracting enterprises eager to experiment with cutting-edge capabilities. This rise of AWS's rivals has raised questions about Amazon's broader AI strategy, and how the incumbent will fare in the years to come. Garman says he's been hearing these concerns for years, but less so in recent months. He argues that the tide is turning, pointing to AWS's stronger-than-expected results in the company's third quarter as evidence that his strategy is working.

"The world is not slowing down" - AWS CEO says AI agents will be bigger than the Internet, so act now

AWS unveils a whole host of new services and tools to benefit from the AI era AWS CEO Matt Garman has declared AI agents will be more important than the Internet or cloud computing. Speaking in his opening keynote at AWS re:Invent 2025, Garman outlined his view of what AI can bring to companies of all sizes, across all industries. And with such a high level of interest and investment, it's perhaps not surprising that AI agents took center stage for AWS at its biggest event of the year. "The world is not slowing down - in fact, if there's one thing that I think we can all count on, it's that more change is coming - and one of the biggest opportunities, that is going to change everyone's business, is agents," Garman said. "Right now, we're witnessing an explosion of events in AI - every single customer experience, every single company - frankly every single industry, is in the process right now of being reinvented. "We're still in the early days of what AI is going to deliver, and the technology is iterating faster than anything any of us have ever witnessed before." "It wasn't that long ago that we were all testing and experimenting with chatbots, and now it seems like there's something new every day." With a range of new products stretching across the entire gamut of AI, Garman was keen to show off customer success stories from the likes of Adobe and Sony, showing the range of potential advantages on offer. "(I believe) the true value of AI has not yet been unlocked," he added, "I believe that the advent of AI agents has brought us to an inflection point in AI's trajectory - it is turning from a technical wonder into something that delivers us real value." "This change is going to have as much impact on your business as the Internet or the cloud - I believe that in the future, there's going to be billions of agents inside of every company, across every industry."

Exclusive: AWS CEO Matt Garman stakes claim in AI race.

Why it matters: Last week's news cycle was dominated by Google staking a claim that it has pulled ahead of OpenAI. * Amazon now wants to signal that it belongs in that same tier, with its own models, chips and the world's largest cloud. The big picture: Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman tells Axios that AWS is increasingly the cloud where customers are putting real production workloads due to its combination of capabilities and cost effectiveness. * "A year ago, there were questions about whether we'd missed the wave, but now, most people are building their production systems in AWS because of what we've built over the past couple of years," Garman told Axios. "People are now realizing that Amazon has a great platform for AI." * Garman's comments come as the company opens its Las Vegas conference, where it's expected to unveil new AI models and infrastructure. What they're saying: The industry itself is at an inflection point, Garman said, moving from summarization and content creation to transforming broader workflows by taking on repetitive tasks. * "It's not slowing down anytime soon. I think there was fear a year ago that maybe the model capabilities were plateauing," Garman said. "I think that is not the case anymore." Between the lines: AWS is touting a trio of strengths to convince customers -- and Wall Street -- that it's at the AI frontier: * Amazon hosts Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, plus Amazon's own models -- giving enterprises an array of choices that rivals sometimes lack. * Trainium and Inferentia -- Amazon's custom chips -- are designed to help AWS compete on cost. * Garman has also pointed to AWS's deep integration with enterprise systems, security policies and compliance requirements. Yes, but: AWS is often still missing from the conversations around the latest and greatest AI. * Microsoft remains the default AI cloud for many CIOs because of its OpenAI partnership and early Copilot momentum. * Although Amazon has been beefing up its internal models, it lacks a flagship frontier model directly comparable to GPT-5 or Gemini 3 Pro. * The success of Trainium and other Amazon-designed chips depends on convincing customers to switch from Nvidia -- something AWS must prove at scale. By the numbers: While AWS remains the leading name in the broader cloud computing race, its rivals are growing faster. * Last quarter AWS saw its business grow 20%. That compares to 34% for Google Cloud and 40% for Microsoft's Azure. The bottom line: AWS dominates cloud, but is still working to prove its position at the AI frontier. We'll have more from Garman in Wednesday's AI+ newsletter. Sign up here.