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Amazon and other tech giants are boosting their capital spending on cloud infrastructure for anticipated AI demand. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sounded more bullish than ever about the potential for artificial intelligence on the company’s earnings call this week.
“We think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it, and with inference being a core building block, just like compute and storage and database,” Jassy said. He added that “AI represents, for sure, the biggest opportunity since cloud, and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the internet.”
But as cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spend record sums to build out their capacity for artificial intelligence models and services, the current realities of customer behavior underscore the risk in those bets.
The basics — storage, compute, etc. — still represent the bulk of demand.
“The big things, the valuable things, the things that drive the world, in a computing sense, are also blessedly the boring things,” says Corey Quinn, the chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the host of the AWS Morning Brief and Screaming in the Cloud podcasts, and the curator of Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter.
That’s not to say there isn’t a core role for AI in the future. But amid all the buzz about AI and the hand-wringing over DeepSeek, the vision expressed by the likes of Jassy and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t reflect the current state of the cloud for most customers, at least not at the scale all the hype would suggest.
That’s one of the takeaways on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Apart from his newsletter and podcasts, Quinn’s day job involves helping customers understand and manage their AWS bills. He uses those insights to provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse and a reality check on the state of the cloud market today.
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Audio editing by Curt Milton.
