Amazon Web Services is the cloud computing division of Amazon and the largest cloud provider globally as of 2026, with roughly 30 percent market share. AWS offers compute (EC2), storage (S3), databases (RDS, DynamoDB), networking (VPC), machine learning (SageMaker, Bedrock), and over two hundred other services delivered as utilities over the internet.
AWS's strategic importance has shifted substantially in the AI era. AWS was the undisputed default for enterprise workloads through 2015-2022 but has faced real competitive pressure from Google Cloud (via TPU and Gemini) and Microsoft Azure (via the OpenAI partnership) for AI-specific workloads. AWS's response has centered on Bedrock (a multi-provider AI model gateway), custom silicon (Trainium, Inferentia), and deep enterprise integration for non-AI workloads that remain the majority of cloud spending.
For enterprise AI deployments, the choice of AWS versus alternatives is increasingly about AI-model access rather than core infrastructure capability.