AWS is 20—and all in on AI

The technology is both a threat and an opportunity, says CEO Matt Garman. To confront it, cloud computing’s pioneer is calling on old skills and new muscles.

[Photo illustration: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]

In 2006, Amazon Web Services was a fledgling—and a bit of an oddity. 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........

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