Mitch Ashley & Nick Patience on AWS AI Advancements and Cloud Competition | AWS re:Invent 2025

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Our Tech Drunk TV coverage of AWS Reinvent for 2025. I promised you two more analysts and here are two more analysts, both both of my colleagues with the FU group.

Let me introduce you quickly to them, to the far right. He's no stranger to you. If you watch Textron, it's my good friend Mitch Ashley and the man in the middle.

Actually, you've been on a Textron TV once before, I remember. But if you don't know Nick, patience, he is, Nick is our AI coverage specialist, but he's also, Nick is one of the founders, co-founders of the 4 5 1 group. If you follow the tech analyst scene, widely, widely respected.

Nick, it's great to have you here live with us, Mitch, as always. You bet. Um, I didn't mean to embarrass you, but did I leave anything out that you wanted to mention about yourself?

My lifetime's a accomplishment. No, that's good. Stay right.

That's a good salesperson. Stop it. Yes.

Mitch, what about you? Just in terms of coverage, you know, I do kinda all things software development, um, AI agent development. Nick and I collaborate on the AI side of it.

I collaborate with, with Brad and, uh, Fernando and respective areas. So it's, it's a good team here at Futurum. Absolutely.

So guys, let's dive in. It was an exciting day. A lot of announcements in that keynote.

Um, you must be happy 'cause every, it was ai, all AI all the time. It seemed for a lot. Everything is every, every con, every conference is so, yeah, it's good.

So I'm not, you know, let's say I've been around the block more than was Mitchell once taught me a saying from Nebraska. I may have been Born that night, but it wasn't Last. Right.

But it wasn't last night I learned all these Midwest Nebraska sayings from well Enough to Turn up. We didn't have those sayings in New York, but Mitch, but Nick, how much of this is PR announcements that shows, and how much of it is rubber meeting the road? Well, I guess for these guys, for AWS they used to, um, leave everything to reinvent, so everything to this, this time, straight after Thanksgiving.

And they, they realized, um, yeah, the world doesn't work like that anymore. Um, so yeah, I think they, they had some really interesting stuff, uh, but it wasn't, yeah, some, some of the years you come here and it's completely like every, just, there's a list and it's so, so, so long. I think it, I think it's, yeah, the stuff is, the stuff is real.

I think you, you, you probably already talked about it, I'm not sure what you talked about, but, you know, the Nova Forge thing Yes. I think is really interesting. That's the kind of the, yeah.

Sort of industrialization of the AI process. And I, I know perhaps digging into that, um, pretty deeply. Um, but I think that that's a really, um, interesting thing.

It's not to say you couldn't do that with any other provider, um, but it's more like they wrap it up as a service and make it easier. Um, then I think it is a, you know, I think that that is a, um, yeah, it's real. I mean, there's stuff, yeah, most of the stuff is real.

Um, I mean, some of it's in public preview, so it's very, very early. Um, but I, but I think, you know, AWS has, um, is having to work hard. It's obviously the dominant cloud provider, but it's having to work hard to reestablish its AI credentials somewhat.

Um, you know, I've had many discussions with, with the company about that, you know, with the current thinking obviously is of the three hyperscalers, that that kind of Google has an edge. Um, but AWS has a market share and have, you know, hundreds of thousands of SageMaker customers and things like that. So they're not exactly, um, you know, flailing away, not knowing what's going on.

Um, and, but, but I think it, you know, the, you know, the models, um, the Nova forged stuff, the chips, um, it's like, like all the hyperscalers, it's, it's, it's the ability these days for them to have everything from, from the chips to the applications and, and all the bits of, no, It's a vertical integration for sure. We used to call it back in the day caret suits, right? Mm-hmm.

Where you had that whole family. But how much of this, I wonder is AWS pivoting to AI in a big way because maybe they were a little bit, or at least perceived to be a little bit behind Google and Microsoft, right? Even in the FU and Signal report, they weren't in the top two.

Mm-hmm. Right? Not, not that the fu of Signal is the source, but it's a source.

Yes. It it is. It's, it is, it is a definitive source.

The Source. And, and they weren't in the top two. No, they weren't.

And, and look, Google does have an inherent adv advantage here. They do have that true vertical integration up and down the, the, the stack. Um, is is, is that maybe at play here?

Yeah, I think so. Think, feel like they to play a little catch up. Yeah.

And that's, that's an uncomfortable situation for them. They're the 800 pound gorilla. Yeah, I think so.

I mean, the reason we put them in that situation, you know, there's many reasons. I'm not gonna go through all of 'em, but there's many reasons. But I mean, when you look at the, you know, Google invented transformers, you know, and, and so, you know, they, they kind of were there at the beginning of, of, of the, of this whole thing.

And then many other things that are going on. It has been a bit of a, you know, a race to the, um, you know, the, who's got the best model thing and that's, you know, who's got the be best model today. And there'll be somebody along tomorrow with a, with a newer one.

And until really reinvent last year, Amazon, yeah. AWS really wasn't playing in that, um, in that, in that, that way at all. They announced Nova a year ago.

Um, and now we've got the, the new ones, which I think you've already, you've already talked about. Um, that's not the only measure though of, of success in ai. Um, you know, certainly from the end user point of view, it's not, it's just 'cause it's, it's a lot of it is kind of far and confusion and say the, you know, today's benchmarks are, you know, are old hat by tomorrow.

But I think it's, yes they are, they are. Um, they weren't as prominent in that, that kind of model race. Um, that may end up being a good thing for them, I dunno, um, in terms of, um, you know, have the resources you have to spend to, to get, you know, to the top of that, that that tree.

Um, and then obviously Microsoft was kind of outsourcing everything to open AI and now is obviously playing a more pragmatic game. Um, so it's, it's kind of, you know, they're right up there because of open their open AI relationship, which gradually is gonna be get diluted both from a kind of financial point of view, but also, um, from a kind of, you know, product, you know, development point of view as they can hedge their bets, um, with, with other model companies. So I think it's, it's um, it's certainly, I don't really believe it's a race that only one company.

It's not a zero sum gun game. No. You know, not one company's gonna win and every else, you know, loses.

Um, and you know, maybe in a year's time we'll be look thinking back and saying, you know, look at AWS they've caught up. You know? So I think there's the user, their customer base is so vast.

Um, No, they still have, look, they still have a lot of cards Yeah. That are worth playing. Let me pause it.

Something else at you, Nick. Tremendous amount of attention on the train and processors and this follows, I think it was last week or the week before Google's announcement a around, uh, chips. Is this the signal that we're moving, that the real action is moving from GPUs to other kinds of chips?

From, so in other words, from training to inference, I'm not taking up any collections or playing any death nails for Nvidia. Mind you, but are we moving towards, not towards but a more multipolar world where GPU isn't the only chip we need? Yeah.

We use for ai. I mean, organizations have wanted silicon diversity for, for, for years. And they haven't got it at the moment.

I think it's baby steps, you know, very, very, very, very baby steps. There's, you know, it's, there's a Nvidia has, you know, it's, you know, dominant market share and we'll do for quite a long time to come. Um, and will it eventually slip, slip from 90% to 85% to 80%?

Yes, it probably will. And that's got as much to do with a MD as it has got to do with AWS and Google. But I think, yeah, the tra stuff was interesting.

It was completely predictable. 'cause they said they were gonna do it last year and they did it, so that's good. Uh, they trained two last year, train three this year, now they're talking about training four.

Um, Six X is powerful is Three. Yeah. And then you have these kind of train, um, the ultra service things, which is kind of, it's the sovereignty play.

It's like, you know, you get our, our chips plus, you know, all the, all the interconnects and everything else and in, in the stack and, and shove it in your data center. And I think that's, um, something they had not really talked about much. They've had outposts for years and it went through a period of time, um, in 24 and in early 25 of like ignoring the fact that on premises matter at all.

And you know, the old ad adage, once you move everything to the cloud, X, y, Z will happen. Well people don't move everything to the cloud. So that, that's, I thought that was really interesting as well.

Yeah. Um, and I think, yeah, I think that is a, um, you're gonna hear more sovereignty stuff from, from AWS um, in, you know, new Year as well. And that's, and that's gone from being, uh, an, you know, as a lot of, uh, people in the US thinking of obsession of Germany and France and countries like that to more or less every single country in the world.

Um, so No, you know what, so our, our whole presence here is sponsored by our friends at suse. Alright. And, you know, they've gone into digital sovereignty in a big way.

They've actually started a whole division around it. Now granted they are a Luxembourg, European based company. And, and so maybe that feeds into the narrative you're talking about, but I'll go one better.

I think we may see a world in the US where you have state to state sovereignty issues, right? I'm a, I'm a, for lack of a better word, a blue state versus a red state, and I don't want abortion data available to the red state. Right.

And just so I, I want to know if it's hosted in my state and I want to make sure they can't get there on this pretty close. Yeah. Right.

So when we talk about data sovereignty, it's not just a nation state thing, it's a, it's, it's a territory to territory thing. It's, it's a big, it's a big issue that's gonna get bigger. Hmm.

Nick walked around today, you had a lot of meetings, spoke to a lot of people. What, what surprised you? Um, what surprised me?

Um, that's a difficult question to answer off the top of my head. Um, I guess, I guess, yeah, the few people I've, I've spoken to so far the, uh, the show floor can be a bit intimidating. Um, yeah, I think, I think it, I think it is the, you know, the, the progress of the agent stuff, um, which may be, you know, people want to say they're further along than they actually are because yeah, we're incredibly early as we, that's, that itself has become a bit of a cliche saying we are incredibly early.

Um, but it's, I think, yeah, I think some of that, the, um, the claimed, um, progress in that is, uh, somewhat surprising, probably therefore maybe not entirely true. Um, so, so, so that's a, that might be a bit of a sort, sort of a surprise sort of a, It's a very UK proper way of saying I don't believe it. Yeah, yeah.

Right, Right. We're a very, very polite nation. Um, but it's, but yeah, I think, I think it's, yeah, I think that's, that's, that's probably the case, I guess.

I mean from the AWS point of view, I think the, I think the kind of, um, the sovereignty stuff we were just talking about, I think, yeah, the, the amount of emphasis I've, I've seen on that and heard from them on that was, um, you was probably a bit higher than I thought it was gonna be. Yeah. I, I don't disagree there Nick.

I know you have to run out to another appointment. That's why I wanted to focus on you earlier without I going to Mitchell. Um, you recently, I think the, the, uh, the signal report that you had done on AI had come out, um, where can people keep up with what you, I mean, not just the signal reports, but you, you are constantly putting out Yeah.

com, that's where, that's where all, all our stuff goes. Um, you know, on the socials at, on on, on Twitter X anic patients, but not very often, um, on LinkedIn more often. Yeah.

Um, but yeah, the signal stuff is available, um, for everybody to, to look at. And so that was the first one of, of the AI platforms and I think we had nine vendors in the, in the signal. Um, and obviously of which AWS was, was certainly one.

And there will be, there will be others along in Q1, Q2 of, of, of next year. I'm sure I'm not gonna commit to a specific date, but, you know, there's more, it's been a really interesting exercise and, and we've had some sort of validation, the, the way we've done it and how we quickly, we can turn these around, um, and get results, which, um, actually make sense and resonate in the market, I think has been really encouraging. Absolutely.

Nick, I'm gonna let you go. Thank you so much. Thank Nick patience.

Check him out. Another one of the great fu room analysts. We're gonna take just a quick three second break as we unhook Nick from his tether here on the microphone.

And I'll continue our conversation with Mitchell. You're watching Text Drunk tv.