Today, I’ve got a juicy interview with AWS CEO Matt Garman. Keep reading for a quick feed check, and my CNBC hit this morning.
There’s a version of the last six years where Amazon, not Microsoft, is OpenAI’s primary cloud partner. The Elon Musk vs. OpenAI lawsuit discovery process showed that Amazon was actually the first cloud provider to partner with OpenAI when it was a small research lab. Musk told Sam Altman in one early email that he “slightly” preferred Microsoft because “Jeff [Bezos] is a bit of a tool and Satya [Nadella] is not.” Microsoft wrote its first check soon after.
This morning, OpenAI’s main models landed on AWS for the first time. CEO Matt Garman shared the stage with OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, at the invite-only “What’s Next with AWS” event in downtown San Francisco to roll out the goods: GPT-5.4 in preview on Bedrock (with 5.5 coming soon), plus a new Bedrock Managed Agents product co-built with OpenAI. Altman sent a recorded video message for the keynote praising Amazon as a key partner going forward. Across the bay in Oakland, Musk’s legal team was giving opening statements for the trial that will determine OpenAI’s fate.
Amazon’s integration with OpenAI is deeper than the typical arrangement of a hyperscaler serving a model to its customers. The partnership has been in motion for “the last six to nine months,” Garman told me after he got offstage earlier today. “The biggest thing is, how do we get OpenAI technologies in the hands of AWS customers. That’s what they wanted, and that’s what we wanted.”
