Why Amazon’s AI Business Is Growing Three Times Faster Than Its Cloud Services

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in the Q3 2024 earnings call that the company’s AI business is now growing more than three times faster than the early growth of its cloud computing division.

AWS still posted 19% year‑over‑year revenue growth to $27.5 billion, boosted by rising AI demand.

AI business: cloud, generative, machine learning

Jassy highlighted three macro layers of AI opportunities and stressed that enterprises must move data to the cloud to stay competitive in generative AI. Over the past 18 months AWS released more than twice as many ML and generative AI features as all other major cloud providers combined.

Custom chips and generative AI integration

To meet AI compute needs Amazon is investing in its own chips, launching Trainium for model training and Inferentia for inference. A second‑generation Trainium is slated to launch in weeks, offering high performance at lower cost. The Bedrock platform also added new generative models such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, Meta’s Llama 3.2 and Mistral’s LLM.

Investing in AI startups

Anthropic announced a $4 billion additional investment from Amazon on 22 Nov, bringing Amazon’s total stake to $8 billion and making Amazon a minority shareholder and the official cloud provider for Anthropic.

Anthropic is co‑developing future generations of Trainium chips with AWS’s Annapurna Labs and plans to train its foundational large language model on Amazon hardware. The UK competition regulator said the partnership is outside its jurisdiction.

Launching Q Developer

AWS’s generative AI and developer experience director Srini Iragavarapu explained that coding is only a small part of the Q Developer puzzle; the tool now spans design, deployment, maintenance and operations. Originally released in June 2022 as Code Whisperer, it was renamed Q Developer and now integrates Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 model, offering multi‑file editing, unit‑test generation, feature planning and security scanning.

Amazon Q is the broader brand under which Q Developer operates, providing AI assistance directly inside code editors rather than a separate chat pane.