December kicked off with possibly the biggest annual event in enterprise technology, AWS re:Invent, and the conversations were, unsurprisingly, all about AI.
While Matt Garman, chief executive officer of Amazon Web Services Inc., delivered a keynote that leaned more pragmatic than flashy, theCUBE’s coverage — including an interview with Garman himself — highlights the strides Amazon is making toward agentic AI and custom models.
“Amazon’s in a position where they have to service millions of … legacy customers,” said Dave Vellante (right), chief analyst for theCUBE Research. “They’ve got millions and millions of customers running cloud services on Nitro and virtualized EC2 instances and S3 buckets, and they’re adding all kinds of new services. But now, they’re going to balance that out with investments in AI.”
Other top headlines this week included Google LLC’s challenge to OpenAI and potentially, Nvidia Corp., and Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery Inc. for $82.7 billion — all big shifts in the tech and media landscape. Meanwhile, Databricks Inc. is raising more billions with no signs of going public yet.
On the latest episode of theCUBE Pod, Vellante and Executive Analyst John Furrier (left), discussed evolving enterprise technology and the takeaways from re:Invent. They also discussed Furrier’s interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and the semiconductor race.
Amazon plunges into agentic AI at re:Invent
AWS re:Invent saw a slew of announcements, including updates to Amazon’s AgentCore platform and the launch of Nova Forge, a new service for training and building custom frontier AI models. The latter will enable organizations to merge proprietary data with Nova’s frontier capabilities, which could be a game changer, according to Vellante.
“Enterprises want open-weight models,” he said. “They want to be able to customize those models. This is the first that I know of that is making the training data available. There’s certainly no U.S. company doing that. There may be some third-party Chinese models doing that, but this is Amazon doing it.”
Amazon also introduced its autonomous agent, Kiro, at re:Invent. One of three new agents, Kiro is intended to smooth out the friction in agentic systems used by code developers. Vellante describes it as “way more than vibe coding.”
Salesforce Inc., despite seeing slower earnings growth, is gaining momentum with its AI efforts. Its Agentforce 360 platform will now be available on AWS, allowing their customers to easily integrate data with Amazon’s cloud.
“With this agentic auto coding and Kiro, this new autonomous coding is going to open up massive ecosystem integrations,” Furrier said. “Using Salesforce development … to actually make our Salesforce interfaces better without even going into Salesforce to do it is totally incredible.”
Nvidia leads shift toward ‘factories of intelligence’
After Nvidia received an award for most respected public semiconductor company at the GSA annual awards ceremony last week, Furrier nabbed an exclusive interview with Huang. The takeaway, according to Furrier, is that AI factories at the edge are imminent.
“If the computer is changing to a factory of intelligence, then you’re going to have a distributed factory of intelligence model,” he said. “You can have distributed computing with an overlay intelligent factory model that’s generative, that’s run by agents. There’s only one conclusion to Jensen’s narratives, which is that AI factories will be connected and distributed and have highly intelligent interconnects and software will run on it.”
Google has started selling Tensor Processing Units, putting into question Nvidia’s dominance. Amazon, too, is releasing increasingly powerful Trainium chips. However, Nvidia is unlikely to lose its position any time soon, according to Vellante.
“They’re not really replacing Nvidia; they’re complimenting Nvidia,” he said. “People don’t understand the amount of volume lead that Nvidia has. 2026, they’re still going to have 90% of the market in terms of volume. That’s Nvidia’s advantage, in addition to the fact that they’ve got CUDA and they’ve got the libraries. It’s just easier to use Nvidia.”
Enterprise technology update: The semiconductor race sparks concern in U.S.
Huang’s goal has been to make the U.S. dominant in telecommunications again, according to Furrier, and part of that is winning the semiconductor race. Furrier believes that Intel Corp. is making a comeback, although Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is still the current foundry leader.
“One of the things that [Intel] can do is use their leverage of their assets to create new business model opportunities and go to their partners and say, ‘How could we, Intel, help you?’” Furrier said. “That’s what I see them doing in the market right now. They’re really revenue-focused, verses, ‘Hey, we’re Intel; buy from us.’”
Geopolitics could also shift the semiconductor business in the next few years. China is making plans to invade Taiwan, which would put TSMC into their hands. If that happens, where does that leave the U.S.? In a tricky position, according to Vellante.
“What happens is now China controls the most important semiconductor manufacturer in the world and has yet another lever that’s bigger than rare earths, and what do we got?” he said. “We’ve got a U.S.-based factory of TSMC, which will now be owned by China, and we’ve got Intel, which is struggling to get 18A volume up and getting 14A. We’ll see if that even works.”
Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:
Matt Garman, CEO of AWSSwami Sivasubramanian, VP of database, analytics and machine learning at AWSColleen Aubrey, SVP of AWS Solutions at AWSJensen Huang, founder and CEO of NvidiaCharlie Kawwas, president of BroadcomRob Hof, editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE MediaMark Albertson, senior writer at SiliconANGLE MediaJoe Rogan, American podcasterDavid Linthicum, principal analyst at theCUBE ResearchDonald Trump, 45th and 47th president of the United States of AmericaDavid Sacks, White House AI and crypto czarDario Gil, Under Secretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy and Director of the Genesis MissionJoe Biden, 46th United States presidentGeorge Gilbert, principal analyst at theCUBE ResearchDavid Floyer, analyst emeritus at theCUBE ResearchAndrew Ross Sorkin, American journalist and authorLisa Su, chair and CEO of AMDMarc Benioff, chair and CEO of SalesforceElon Musk, CEO of TeslaNick Otto, global head of strategic partners at IBMSundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and GoogleSarbjeet Johal, founder and CEO of StackpaneMichael Burry, American investorCrawford Del Prete, president of the IDCLina Khan, former chair of the FTC
Here’s the full episode of this week’s theCUBE Pod:
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