The biggest digital warehouse in the world - a huge part of the internet runs on it. And at the same time it's an investor in Anthropic, the company behind Claude.
Amazon starts as an online bookstore. To avoid stumbling during the holiday traffic peaks, it builds itself a huge computer infrastructure of its own - and then discovers that for most of the year it sits half-empty. Instead of throwing it away, it starts renting it out to other companies. That's how AWS is born in 2006 - a business separate from the store itself, selling the infrastructure: servers, disks, databases, raw computing power.
In practice this means the following: you're watching a movie on Netflix - the streaming platform for shows and movies - and the video file itself sits physically on an AWS server. You pay through a bank's app - you're probably also going through AWS. Once, a while back, half the internet stopped at once - from games to banking services - because a problem in a single AWS warehouse pulled everything down with it. The warehouse is so big that when it stumbles, a huge chunk of the network you live on every day stumbles with it.
The model is simple - you pay only for what you use, like electricity or water. A startup with no money for its own servers rents power for an hour; a big corporation rents thousands of machines for a week and then returns them. No one builds their own building for computers anymore - they borrow exactly as much space as they need, exactly when they need it. That's why AWS makes money no matter who wins on the internet - it sells shovels to every player at once.
Here comes the twist that touches you directly, if you're reading anything written with Claude. Amazon has invested over 13 billion dollars directly in Anthropic - the company behind Claude - and has promised tens of billions more on top, tied to certain targets. In return, Anthropic committed to spend 100 billion dollars on computing power from AWS over the next decade, including Amazon's own special chips, called Trainium, on which Claude itself is trained. Amazon is at once a partner in the company and the supplier of the machines it runs on.
Let's wait and see
AWS's scale is so massive it's easy to forget what's behind it - a bookstore that happened to end up owning the most important infrastructure of the modern internet. No one voted for this, it just happened, because Amazon had the money to build a warehouse bigger than anyone else's.
So when Anthropic talks about 'responsible' AI, it's worth remembering who pays its electricity bill and who's a shareholder in it at the same time. It's not a conspiracy - it's just good to know who's standing behind the curtain before you believe the curtain itself.