Amazon invests $100 million in generative AI center as demand for AI applications soars

The AI boom sparked by the sudden success of OpenAI ChatGPT continues to gain momentum without any signs of slowing down. Since the launch of ChatGpt in November of last year, investors have billions of dollars into generative artificial intelligence (AI) startups. Now tech companies are beginning to invest more in the necessary infrastructure to meet the growing demand for AI applications. The latest is Amazon.

Bloomberg recently reported that Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud division of Amazon, is investing $100 million to build a robust AI infrastructure to keep up with increasing competition and position itself against industry leaders like Microsoft and Google in the rapidly growing market for generative AI.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to build the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, connecting Amazon’s AI and machine learning experts with clients who are interested in leveraging the latest technologies to develop applications. Generative AI involves the use of algorithms to generate new content, such as audio, code, images, texts, simulations, and videos, Bloomberg reported,

Several notable companies, including Highspot, Twilio, Ryanair, and Lonely Planet, are among the first users of this innovation center. With the establishment of this center, Amazon aims to increase its sales of cloud services in an increasingly competitive cloud infrastructure market.

A recent analysis by Synergy Research Group reveals that global enterprise spending on cloud solutions reached $63 billion in the first quarter of 2023, marking a 20% increase compared to the same quarter last year. Microsoft and Google exhibited strong year-over-year growth rates, gaining 23% and 10% in worldwide market share, respectively. Meanwhile, Amazon, as the leading player in cloud infrastructure, maintained its 32% market share in Q1.

In an interview at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said, “We will bring our internal AWS experts free-of-charge to a whole bunch of AWS customers, focusing on folks with significant AWS presence, and go help them turbocharge their efforts to get real with generative AI, get beyond the talk.”

In addition, as part of its strategy to compete with major tech rivals, Amazon recently unveiled Bedrock, an AI solution that enables customers to develop their own models similar to ChatGPT. Additionally, Amazon announced Titan, which encompasses two foundational models developed by Amazon Machine Learning.

Furthermore, recent job postings on LinkedIn suggest that Amazon is preparing to integrate AI-powered “search” functionality into its online web store, featuring a ChatGPT-like interface. This indicates Amazon’s commitment to leveraging AI technologies across various aspects of its business, extending beyond cloud services.

Launched 17 years ago, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual, and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 69 Availability Zones (AZs) within 22 geographic regions.