Amazon's AWS Shows Signs of Weakness as Competitors Charge Ahead (bloomberg.com)
- Reference: 0179864164
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/24/1830258/amazons-aws-shows-signs-of-weakness-as-competitors-charge-ahead
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-24/amazon-s-aws-is-slowed-by-bloat-as-competitors-clinch-ai-deals
Bloomberg interviewed 23 current and former AWS employees who described management layers that proliferated after a pandemic hiring binge. One sales engineer who was six managers from Jeff Bezos before the pandemic found himself fifteen rungs from CEO Andy Jassy earlier this year. AWS hesitated to invest in Anthropic when the AI startup was spending most of its cash on Amazon servers.
Executives doubted the Anthropic AI could be monetized and were culturally reluctant to pay for external technology they believed could be built in-house. Google invested in early 2023. Amazon followed that September [2]with $4 billion in commitments . On Thursday, Google said it will [3]supply up to 1 million AI chips to Anthropic .
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-24/amazon-s-aws-is-slowed-by-bloat-as-competitors-clinch-ai-deals
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/23/09/25/1319210/amazon-to-invest-as-much-as-4-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic
[3] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/10/23/2054219/anthropics-google-cloud-deal-includes-1-million-tpus-1-gw-of-capacity-in-2026
Wait and see if they were right (Score:1)
What does Anthropic do that Bedrock can't?
AWS's big sell is that it is a 'one-stop-shop' for all your infrastructure and hosting needs. My bet is when the dust settles the GenAI applications that are actually valuable will get migrated to where the rest of the resources are, especially as any capability gap shrinks.
AWS is starting to slip (Score:2)
I've been a long time AWS user, and I noticed that their quality is slipping. Their tech support is becoming increasingly unhelpful, and escalating to your TAM is useless because they can't do anything to help solve the problem.
I also noticed that unexplained small outages are becoming more frequent, along with the larger outages like we saw in us-east-1 last week. Worst yet, the cost for compute is actually starting to creep upward in terms of cents per hour for server runtime, after years where it constan
AI as a Commondity (Score:2)
Most value in today's market comes from controlling the supply. I suspect AI will be a commodity purchased based on cost with no one really able to control the supply. That will likely mean that a lot of the investment being made will turn out to be of much less value than anticipated. Surgeons are expensive because the supply is controlled through licensing. Once they are replaced with AI and a robot, the cost of surgery is going to be determined by how easy it is to build a robot using AI, not how much su
Re: (Score:2)
You are assuming that AI will be a commodity which will be in demand. If that's not the case, your argument completely breaks.
metastasized tech debt (Score:2)
metastasized tech debt
Odd definition of weakness (Score:2)
AWS revenues have been growing at + ~$6B per year for a few years and that has not changed. Just because MS is currently growing faster because they have a bunch of locked-in customers whose easy-path is Azure, doesn't mean AWS is "weak". Since Azure growth is coming from a largely fixed pool of customers, it will taper off at some point. There are plenty of things to not like about AWS' corporate culture, but the business seems to be firing on all cylinders when it comes to revenue growth.
Hmm (Score:2)
They can't be all that weak if half the web goes down when one of their servers does ...
Whatever your opinion of Amazon or Bezos.... (Score:2)
and mine isn't particularly favorable, AWS is a FANTASTIC achievement.
for it to have been built by a glorified department store is downright ASTOUNDING when NONE of the tech industry titans had a comparable offering still boggles my mind.
their stocks should have dropped to $10 the day AWS launched.
Re: (Score:2)
The idea was good, but being the first mover is always brings it's problems. Competition is now eating AWS' lunch with regard to usability. Maybe it starts to shine when you are running huge deployments, but if the first impression sucks and a client goes elsewhere because of it, they will not be coming back, and you lost your chance.
Re: (Score:2)
" Competition is now eating AWS' lunch with regard to usability"
which?
I haven't looked at any except Azure in years and it looks like I'll soon be living & breathing Azure as my org is looking to dump VMware for Azure Local
I find that hard to believe (Score:2)
Microsoft moves things around every couple of weeks. What used to be a standard feature is now billed separately... actually that probably explains Microsoft's increasing revenues.