Beyond the cloud: How US firm has built muscle in the digital world

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In early December 2025, the spotlight in Las Vegas didn’t shine on a headliner; it belonged to Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Taking the stage at the 14th annual AWS re:Invent, Garman addressed a live audience of more than 60,000 people, while nearly two million more tuned in from around the world. What followed wasn’t just another corporate keynote. It was a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the strategy, ambition and scale of one of the most powerful technology forces on the planet.

The firm dominates the global cloud infrastructure market while setting the pace in machine learning and artificial intelligence innovation.

Garman’s speech unveiled the underlying vision of what is termed the “Age of Agents”, or autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) systems that move beyond passive assistance to active orchestration of complex workflows, reshaping industries and redefining human-machine collaboration.

In his speech, the uninitiated might as well have been in an information desert upon hearing technical terms such as next-generation EC2 Trn3 Ultraservers, Trainium 4 chips, and the Amazon Nova 2.0 suite.

Yet these are innovations designed to accelerate artificial intelligence workloads at an unprecedented scale and giving AWS the unrivalled command over the world’s digital frontier. According to Garman, “AWS has by far been the largest and most broadly deployed AI Cloud infrastructure anywhere in the world” with a network of data centres spanning 38 regions and 120 availability zones with millions of customers running every imaginable use across every single industry, including financial services, healthcare, media, entertainment, telecommunication, and even government agencies.

For example, one of the company’s database services, Amazon Bedrock, is currently powering more than 100,000 companies around the world, while the United States intelligence community has chosen the company as its cloud of choice for more than a decade.

In addition, more than half of the world startups funded by tier one venture capitalists run on AWS.

Business acceleration

In the last one year, the company added 3.8 gigawatts (GW) of data centre capacity, more than any other tech company in the world and has the world’s largest private network, which has increased by 50 per cent over the last 12 months, resulting in more than nine million kilometres of terrestrial and subsea cable, or enough optical cabling to reach from the Earth to the moon and back, for over 10 times.

And the bottom line did not disappoint either.

“AWS has grown to be a $132 billion (Sh17 trillion) business, accelerating 20 per cent year over year,” Garman announced. “I want to put this a little bit in perspective. The amount we grew in the last year alone was about $22 billion. That absolute growth over the last 12 months is larger than the annual revenue of more than half of the Fortune 500.”

To put the size of the tech company’s valuation in perspective, it can finance Kenya’s budget four times over, considering that Kenya had proposed a budget of Sh4.29 trillion for the 2025/26 fiscal year.

Like many tech companies, the growth of AWS was driven by inventions meant to take “cumbersome” tasks from developers or builders who have been spending more time and money investing in servers and infrastructure management.

According to Garman, the company “wanted to make it possible for every developer or inventor in her dorm room or garage to access the technology, infrastructure and capabilities so that they could build whatever they could imagine” while bringing the time and the cost of experimentation down to zero.

“Twenty years ago, it just wasn’t possible for developers or builders to get the servers or compute capacity that they needed without investing significant capital and time. Developers were spending way too much of their time procuring servers, managing infrastructure and not enough of that time building,” said Garman.

Take the case of AudioShake, a company that uses state-of-the-art machine learning models to offer low-cost, automated lyric transcription of any song and word-by-word lyric alignment. Previously, such automation would have required tonnes of man-hours that should otherwise go towards music production.

Yet, tools such as Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Polly enable customers to automate transcription, translation and text-to-speech for audio content.

“Just think of three musicians recording on a street corner. What if we could just isolate the music now from the car driving by, or just the conversation going on between the people in the background?  We separate sound so that humans and machines can access it, make sense of it and understand it in all kinds of new ways,” says Audioshake CEO Jessica Powell.

According to Powell, such a multi-speaker separator, the world’s first, is being used to isolate individual voices in environments like call centres and in the medical field to assist those with hearing impairment and whose voices are on a decline.

“If we think about hearing and speaking impairments, there’s a lot that sound separation can do to help. We work with some nonprofits that work in [this] space, where they’re using old recordings of their patients, separating the voices so that then it can be cloned and the patient can speak with their original voice before their voice started to degrade,” said Powell.

John Kodera, the chief digital officer and CEO of Sony Group Corporation, says that since the founders created the company in 1946, the dream has been to enrich people’s lives through the power of technology by delivering new experiences and lifestyles.

Sony does that through a philosophy called Kando, a Japanese term for deep emotional connection or experience, across Sony’s diverse business portfolio, including electronics, gaming, music and movies.

In its transformation from analogue to digital, says Kodera, Sony chose AWS as the provider for its global footprint and high standards in availability and scalability.

One of Sony’s most remarkable productions in 2025 was the anime movie Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle. As of late November, this film had become the highest ever-grossing Japanese film released worldwide and fifth highest grossing film across all categories in 2025.

“The movie married the creator’s vision with a deep understanding of their funds, and our relationship with AWS playing a pivotal role in making this happen,” said Kodera.

Sony devices

Kodera, who was the president of the network service company for PlayStation and other Sony devices, said they utilised AWS building blocks for the network architecture during the launch of PlayStation 5 in 2020. “Today, our relationship with AWS supports safe, secure and high-quality gaming experiences for up to 129 million gamers to connect and experience Kando together. Moving forward, we see incredible potential for growing the fan community, connecting funds with similar tastes and interests across our diverse portfolio,” he says.

Garman said that not many companies have been able to transition as successfully as Sony from an electronics company into a global digital media business, adding that such a major change is only possible through the right technology platform that embraces change rapidly.

“When you have your data in the Cloud, it turns out you can move more rapidly, and you can adjust to any of those unexpected changes that come your way. The world is not slowing down. In fact, if there’s one thing that I think we can all count on, it’s that more change is coming now,” he said.

A key highlight of his keynote speech was the framing of AWS as the architect of a new era—the “Age of Agents”—where AI systems evolve from reactive assistants into proactive, autonomous agents capable of writing code, diagnosing outages, conducting market research, and orchestrating multi-hour workflows with minimal human input.

Having invested billions of dollars in global data centres and secure architectures, the company has embedded itself at the heart of modern innovation, giving customers “the freedom and confidence to invent and scale with AI”.