Amazon’s cloud unit said Thursday that it’s allocating $100 million for a center to help companies use generative artificial intelligence, the technology that’s taken off in the months since OpenAI unleashed its ChatGPT chatbot on the public.
It’s a small investment for a company with $64 billion in cash and half a trillion dollars a year in operating expenses. But the announcement shows that Amazon Web Services recognizes the significance of the current moment in generative AI and the importance of being in the conversation, alongside rivals Microsoft and Google.
“You ask yourself the question — where are the different runners three steps into a 10K race?” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in an interview this week with CNBC. “Does it really matter? The point is, you’re three steps in, and it’s a 10K race.”
As part of the latest announcement, Amazon said it will be adding some data scientists, engineers and solutions architects to the payroll. AWS said the center is already working with two customers, Highspot and Twilio. The company told CNBC that it’s a “program” rather than a physical center.
Amazon, which beat Microsoft and Google to the business of renting out servers and data storage to companies and other organizations, enjoys a commanding lead in the cloud infrastructure market. However, those rivals have had splashier entrances into generative AI, even though Amazon has drawn broadly on AI for years to show shopping recommendations and operate its Alexa voice assistant.
Microsoft has been spending billions on a multilayered alliance with OpenAI, and Google is moving quickly to deploy AI tools it’s built in-house for consumers and businesses.
Nor does Amazon have the first popular large language model that can enable a chatbot or a tool for summarizing documents.
Selipsky said he isn’t concerned. He joined the company in 2005, a year before the launch of AWS’ core services for computing and storage. Echoing Amazon founder and longtime CEO Jeff Bezos, Selipsky said the company has succeeded by listening to customers.
“Amazon has had many examples in its history where it said, we’re going to focus on customers and have steadfast belief that we’re going to work with customers, we’re going to build what they want,” Selipsky said. “And if people want to perceive us in a certain way, we’re misunderstood, that’s OK, as long as customers understand where we’re going.”
One challenge Amazon currently faces is in meeting demand for AI chips. The company chose to start building chips to supplement graphics processing units from Nvidia, the leader in the space. Both companies are racing to get more supply on the market.
“I think the whole world has a shortage in the short term of compute capacity for doing generative AI and machine learning in general right now,” Selipsky said. People are impatient, and the situation will improve in the next few months, he added.
Selipsky is also reckoning with a slowdown in customer spending on cloud, as businesses prepare for ongoing economic uncertainty.
“A lot of customers are largely through their cost optimization, but there have been other customers who are still right in the middle of it,” he said. “It’s hard to predict exactly when that particular trend will be over. But we’re still in the middle of it.”
“AI is going to be this next wave of innovation in the cloud,” he said. “It’s going to be the next big thing that pushes even more customers to want to be in the cloud. Really, you need the cloud for generative AI.”
Also, the way Selipsky sees it, AWS provides a measure of credibility in offering generative AI that eludes others in the space.
“I can’t tell you how many Fortune 500 companies I’ve talked to who banned ChatGPT in the enterprise,” Selipsky said. “Because at least the initial versions of it just didn’t have that concept of enterprise security.”
Coinbase unveiled Wednesday an “everything app” designed to bring more people into the crypto economy.
The “Base App,” which replaces Coinbase Wallet, will combine wallet, trading and payment functions as well as social media, messaging and support for mini apps – all running on the company’s homegrown public blockchain network Base, which is built on Ethereum.
So-called super apps like WeChat and Alipay – which bundle several different services and functionalities into a single mobile app – have long been viewed as the holy grail of fintech by the industry. They’re central to everyday life in China but haven’t been successfully replicated in the West. Meta Platforms and X have made attempts to realize that vision, integrating payments, messaging and social content, among other things.
For Coinbase, the intent is to expand its reach to a new subset of consumers who aren’t necessarily interested in buying or trading crypto, the company’s core business. Over-reliance on that revenue stream has been a sticking point for the company, and some analysts view the Base blockchain as a way for it to drive utility in crypto beyond speculative trading.
As part of the Base App launch, Coinbase also rolled out two key functions meant to help power it: an identity verification system called Base Account and an express checkout system for payments with the Circle-issued USDC stablecoin, called Base Pay.
Base Pay is a one-click checkout feature for USDC payments across the web, developed with Shopify. At the end of the year, Coinbase plans to bring Base Pay to brick-and-mortar stores with tap-to-pay support. Alex Danco, product manager at Shopify, said at Coinbase’s unveiling event that the function has been turned on for tens of thousands of its merchants this week, and will roll out to every merchant by the end of the year. Shopify will also offer 1% cash back in the U.S. for users who pay with USDC on Base later this year, he said.
Base is often touted for its ability to settle a payment in less than a second for less than a cent, which its fans expect will help the network grow in a way other crypto-based payments efforts haven’t.
Now, Coinbase hopes to tap into an opportunity to settle payments on the Base network that go beyond trading and payments. With the introduction of the everything app, the company is emphasizing the opportunity for a new economic model for content creators in particular – one that might give them more direct and diverse monetization options for their content as well as more control over their identity and data.
Coinbase will fund creator rewards and waive USDC transaction fees within chats in the app as part of the effort to bring more users on chain. It is not expected to generate significant revenue right away.
The new consumer app comes as the crypto industry and Coinbase, in particular, embrace a boom in product launches and rollouts thanks to the pro-crypto policies of the Trump administration and more clearly defined crypto regulations expected from Congress — perhaps as soon as this week. Last month Coinbase launched its first credit card with American Express and Shopify rolled out USDC-powered payments through Coinbase and Stripe.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The reach for additional capacity aligns with OpenAI’s desire for more computing power to meet heavy demand after initially relying exclusively on Microsoft for cloud capacity. The two companies’ relations have evolved since then, with Microsoft naming OpenAI as a competitor last year.
Both companies sell AI tools for developers and offer subscriptions to companies.
OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle.
The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon‘s and Microsoft‘s. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives.
The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.
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Last year, Oracleannounced that it was partnering with Microsoft and OpenAl “to extend the Microsoft Azure Al platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” to give OpenAI additional computing power. In March, OpenAI committed to a cloud agreement with CoreWeave in a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion.
Microsoft said in January that it had agreed to move to a model of providing the right of first refusal anytime OpenAI needs more computing resources, rather than being its exclusive vendor across the board. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive on OpenAI’s programming interfaces.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in April that the startup, which draws on Nvidia graphics processing units to power its large language models, was facing capacity constraints.
“if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!” he wrote in an X post at the time.
Reuters reported in June that OpenAI was planning to bring on cloud capacity from Google.
Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.
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In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws in a way that would require investors to own 3% of the stock, today worth about $30 billion, in order to file a derivative lawsuit against the company for breach of fiduciary duties. Authorities in New York State are now asking Tesla to delete the bylaw entirely.
Overseers of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns about 0.1% of Tesla’s shares, submitted a formal proxy proposal and letter to the company on July 11, and shared it with CNBC on Wednesday. They say that Elon Musk’s automaker engaged in a “bait-and-switch” to convince shareholders to approve an incorporation move from Delaware to Texas in June 2024.
Musk made the move after a judge in Delaware voided the $56 billion pay package that the CEO, also the world’s richest person, was granted by Tesla in 2018, the largest compensation plan in public company history. In getting shareholders to approve the change in its state of incorporation, Tesla said that stakeholders’ rights “are substantially equivalent” under the laws of Delaware and Texas.
On May 14, almost a year after Tesla’s move, Texas changed its law to allow corporations in the state to require 3% ownership before being able to carry forth a shareholder derivative suit.
“The very next day, Tesla’s board amended the Company’s bylaws to the maximum allowable 3% ownership threshold, effectively insulating the Company’s directors and officers from accountability to shareholders,” the New York letter says. The letter was signed by Gianna McCarthy, a director of corporate governance with the retirement fund, on behalf of the fund and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
Only three institutions currently own at least 3% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York fund overseers wrote that derivative actions are “the last resort for shareholders to enforce their rights” when company directors or officers violate their fiduciary obligations, and called Tesla’s decision on the matter “egregious.”
In an email to CNBC, DiNapoli said Tesla “deceived shareholders” in assuring them that their rights would remain the same in Texas.
“These actions violate basic tenets of good corporate governance and must be reversed,” he wrote.