Amazon

Amazon does two separate things in AI at once. One is training its own model, called Nova. The other is selling other companies' models through its cloud division, AWS.

Mixing these two up will get a story completely wrong. "Amazon's AI" sometimes means Nova, and sometimes means a third party's model that Amazon merely resells. The company's large investment in Anthropic adds another layer here — Amazon is an investor, a landlord (via cloud infrastructure), and a retailer, but it did not build Claude.

Amazon's own-model business is undergoing a major shakeup heading into 2026. It's winding down parts of the Nova lineup it had spread across multiple efforts and consolidating its focus, which means "Amazon is cutting back on AI" and "Amazon is pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI" can both be true at the same time. The former is about its own models; the latter is about cloud infrastructure.

In August 2026, the web of relationships got even more tangled: Amazon spent $50 billion to acquire a 5% stake in OpenAI. Having already been a major Anthropic investor, Amazon became a shareholder of Anthropic's rival too — making the question "whose side is Amazon on" essentially meaningless. Whoever wins the model race, Amazon stands to profit through cloud revenue and equity stakes.

"Amazon is making a massive investment in AI" — this usually doesn't mean it's building more of its own models. It usually means it's building data centers for others to run their AI on.