Amazon is jumping on the DeepSeek wave to boast about its AI game. But the real test will be its upcoming earnings.
DeepSeek’s recent release of its powerful R1 AI model, and its claims of the comparably low costs it says it spent to create it, erased hundreds of billions of market value this week and incited panicked soul searching inside some of the Magnificent 7.
But for Amazon, at least publicly, company executives are using the explosion of interest as a sales pitch for Amazon’s cloud AI strategy which, much like its online shopping playbook, rests in large part on a wide selection of products or services for customers to choose from. In AWS’s case, that means giving its business customers access to a wide range of AI models to utilize, now including DeepSeek’s R1, which is an open-source model.
In an interview with Fortune on Friday, shortly after Amazon announced multiple ways that business could begin testing the R1 model natively through its cloud computing arm, AWS director Ankur Mehrotra made the case that R1’s out-of-nowhere rise is exactly the type of occurrence that AWS’ AI approach is built for.