AWS is 20-and all in on AI

"Amazon had taken the cloud-computing technologies it had created for its own operations and turned them into a business. Any organization could use them to build out an online presence without managing any infrastructure. Amazon watchers struggled to suss out what the e-tailer was up to: "I have yet to see how these investments are producing any profit," carped one Wall Street analyst."

"At the very start-when it was still a big deal if AWS collected $100 in revenue in a single day-an AWS product manager named Matt Garman had lunch with a friend who worked in another part of the company. "[The coworker] asked, 'How is that AWS thing going? I heard about it, and it sounds pretty interesting,'" Garman recalls. "And I was, like, 'I think this could be a billion-dollar business for Amazon.'""

"As it turned out, AWS smashed through Garman's $1 billion goal and then just kept going, reaching $128.7 billion in revenue in 2025. Along the way, it came to deliver the majority of Amazon's profit, to the tune of $45.6 billion last year. As for Garman, his early faith in the company's potential led to the ultimate payoff in June 2024, when he became its CEO, succeeding Adam Selipsky."

""When we started to get a little traction, there was this kind of meme about how AWS would quickly become a commodity and everything would kind of normalize out," he says. "And our team has shown incredible invention to prove that that's not true.""

Amazon Web Services began in 2006 as a new way to use Amazon’s cloud-computing technologies without managing infrastructure. Organizations could build online presence by offloading technology management to AWS. Early observers questioned whether investments would produce profit. Matt Garman predicted AWS could become a billion-dollar business after an internal conversation, and AWS surpassed that goal while continuing to grow. AWS reached $128.7 billion in revenue in 2025 and delivered most of Amazon’s profit, totaling $45.6 billion last year. AWS also faced expectations that it would become a commodity, but continued innovation prevented normalization. Garman later became CEO in June 2024.

Read at Fast Company