[clarle]

Are Amazon and Meta the ones losing out the most here, in terms of the companies building foundational models?

Probably more understandable for Meta, since they've been leaving the B2B space since Workplace has been sunset. Amazon losing out on this is pretty rough for AWS though.

[paxys]

Is Amazon trying to build a competitive foundation model? From what I can see AWS is instead focused on hosting and re-licensing Claude, Cohere, DeepSeek and others via Bedrock. And it's pretty likely that a large chunk of this $200M will anyways go to AWS. So I'd hardly call them a loser here.

[corlinp]

Amazon has a number of foundation models under the name Amazon Nova, which they claimed were SOTA on release but I haven't heard much at all about them since.

[XorNot]

Aka the "sell gold pans during a gold rush" strategy.

AFAIK AWS are pushing pretty hard with GovCloud these days.

[plasma_beam]

Most of US government runs significant workloads on AWS now and that’s only increasing. They’ve cornered govt cloud infrastructure (with Azure, GCP, etc. very far behind) so not sure this matters in grand scheme of things.

Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.

[haiku2077]

Meta and Amazon both have separate DoD contracts (Meta with Anduril, Amazon through massive GovCloud contracts)

[prmph]

What is $200M to Amazon and Meta?

[moscoe]

Meta can add 1 more member to the technical staff

[florbo]

At the very least it's preventing funds from going to other competitors.