The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024: CEO Exit, AI And Partners

From Adam Selipsky and Matt Garman to new AI innovation and huge executive hires, here are the top ten biggest news stories from AWS in 2024 that made waves in the tech industry.

From Adam Selipsky’s sudden CEO resignation to AWS’ artificial intelligence innovation engine roaring on all fronts, 2024 was a significant year for AWS that gave many a glimpse into its future.

The Seattle-based company grabbed news headlines throughout the year as AWS invested billions of dollars into AI startups like Anthropic, implemented a go-to-market strategy to align better with AWS partners, and appointed Matt Garman to lead the $110 billion cloud market leader as its new CEO.

“For me, AWS is much more than just a business,” said Garman in his first statement as CEO. “We are a team of missionaries working passionately to help make our customers’ lives and businesses better every day.”

[Related: AWS CEO Matt Garman: Partners Are Our ‘Co-Inventors’]

CRN breaks down the top ten biggest AWS news stories of 2024 that every customer, partner and investor should know about.

No. 10: AWS Plants Stake As Major Chip Manufacturer

This year, AWS continued to turn its attention to becoming a larger manufacturer of processing chips.

“People enjoy a narrative where they say like, ‘How are you possibly doing your own chips when you have other partners who have their other chips?’ And it turns out, customers like choice,” said AWS CEO Garman earlier this year.

For years AWS has invested in designing custom silicon optimized for the cloud, including its AWS Inferentia machine learning chips and Trainium ML processors for training deep learning models.

AWS’s initiatives around chips and accelerators heated up in 2024. AWS Graviton4 chips became generally available this year. Additionally, Trainium2 chips also became available this year, while AWS also unveiled new Trainium3 chips that will be coming out in 2025.

The AWS CEO said AWS’ future in homemade silicon chips is to “optimize like crazy” in the semiconductor industry with its unique ability to “control” the entire process thanks to its massive infrastructure footprint.

“We don’t have to build these processors to run in a general purpose environment. They’re going to run exactly in our server, exactly in our data center, exactly with our networking stack, and so we can optimize that just for our customers,” said Garman. “We can optimize like crazy around that, plus we have a very good team that’s building the chips.”

The Takeaway: AWS is striving to become one of the only technology companies in the world that has an end-to-end AI portfolio—from AI chips, infrastructure and supercomputers to AI assistants and AI foundational models. If AWS can win market share in the semiconductor market, Amazon might be able to own the broadest AI hardware, software and services portfolio on the planet.

Click through to read the other nine biggest AWS news stories of 2024.

No. 9: Amazon Mandates Employees Return To The Office Full-Time

After years of letting AWS employees work in a hybrid or remote capacity, Amazon announced in September that corporate workers were mandated to return to the office five days a week. This includes AWS corporate employees.

To better innovate and collaborate, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (pictured) said Amazon will “return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” which will officially begin on Jan. 2, 2025.

“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” said Jassy. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”

Jassy said Amazon understands some employees have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office five days per week “will require some adjustments” from its workers.

The Takeaway: Many AWS employees will need to return to the office full-time in 2025. It will be interesting to see if Amazon’s employee headcount will change next year.

No. 8: AWS Still Rules Cloud Market; Generates Record $110 Billion

AWS continues to dominate the global cloud infrastructure services market by owning a 31 percent share of the market.

The cloud giant generated $27.5 billion in total sales during the third quarter of 2024, representing a growth rate of 19 percent year over year. This means AWS is on a record $110 billion annual run rate with no signs of any significant slowdown ahead in 2025.

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $84 billion in Q3 2024, up roughly $16 billion, or 23 percent year over year. AWS won 31 percent share of that market, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent and Google Cloud at 13 percent.

The Takeaway: There was little-to no change in AWS’ global cloud market share in 2024, which means that AWS’ cloud customer base is larger than Google and Microsoft. This bodes very well for AWS’ artificial intelligence future as cloud computing can unlock AI’s magic by having all the correct data needed on the AWS cloud.

No. 7: AWS’ Partnership With VMware/Broadcom Sours

With Broadcom cutting ties with many VMware channel partners in 2024, it has also severed vendor partnerships as well.

Broadcom decided it will no longer allow AWS partners to resell VMware Cloud on AWS—forcing customers to have to buy the offering direct from Broadcom. Furthermore, Broadcom also disallowed on-demand use of its software in VMware Cloud on AWS.

“VMware Cloud on AWS is no longer directly sold by AWS or its channel partners. It’s that simple,” said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan this year.

AWS told CRN this year that it is “disappointed that AWS is no longer operating as a VMware Cloud on AWS reseller,” but will continue to serve their mutual customers.

However, AWS launched incentives for both partners and customers to migrate VMware workloads over to AWS as well as migrating customers off VMware Cloud on AWS to Amazon EC2.

AWS partners have also launched their own programs to incentivize VMware customers to move to AWS, such as ClearScale and Wanclouds.

The Takeaway: Like several VMware vendor partnerships in 2024, AWS’ relationship with VMware fell off this year. It will be interesting to see how strong AWS’ and Broadcom’s partnership is in 2025.

No. 6: Big Executive Departures And Hires

AWS hired a slew of top executives this year while some big innovators left the company in 2024.

Longtime AWS AI innovator and frequent on-stage keynote speaker, Matt Wood (pictured), left AWS this year as the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence. Wood worked across AWS cloud businesses—including helping to launch Lambda, Kinesis, SageMaker, DeepRacer, Athena, and EMR—with a special focus on data, analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Ashish Dhawan was AWS’ enterprise workload business leader for years, tasked with helping large AWS customers migrate their infrastructure and modernize their applications. Dhawan was AWS’ managing director and worldwide head of enterprise workload sales before leaving for NetApp in 2024.

Another innovator who departed AWS this year, Ahmed Shihab, was responsible for the development, building and operations of all of AWS’ storage and compute systems. He spent about eight years at AWS, from 2016 to 2024, before jumping ship to Microsoft to become corporate vice president of Azure Storage.

On the hiring front, AWS picked up a big Google and Microsoft expert in Baskar Sridharan, AWS’ new vice president of AI and ML Services and Infrastructure. Sridharan is now helping to lead AWS’ AI and GenAI strategy, including around Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, core data services and ML infrastructure for developing deep learning frameworks and engines. He spent over five years at Google Cloud and was a top engineer at Microsoft from 2003 to 2018.

Gee Rittenhouse left his role as CEO of cybersecurity provider Skyhigh Security this year to join AWS to help customers protect their data and applications. Rittenhouse is now vice president at AWS responsible for the company’s enterprise security services business.

No. 5: AI Innovation Engine Roars

It seemed like nearly every week in 2024 AWS was unveiling a new AI product or infuse AI capabilities into flagship services—from cybersecurity to storage.

The dozens of new AI offerings AWS launched this year were mindboggling. Here are just a few big AI and GenAI solutions unveiled in 2024:

- AI Agents for Amazon Bedrock enable GenAI applications to execute multistep tasks across company systems and data sources.

- Amazon Connect was revamped with a new set of AI and security features such as GenAI–powered customer segmentation for targeted campaigns; native WhatsApp Business messaging for omnichannel support; secure collection of sensitive customer data in chat interactions; simplified conversational AI bot management in the Amazon Connect interface; and new enhancements to Amazon Q in Connect.

- AWS new GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection employs sophisticated AI and ML to identify both known and previously unknown attack sequences, while introducing new attack sequence findings and improving actionability for existing detections.

- Amazon Bedrock Studio offers a web-based experience to accelerate the development of generative AI applications by providing a rapid prototyping environment with Bedrock features.

One of the biggest launches this year for AWS that showed its willingness to attack new AI markets, was the launch of Amazon Q, the company’s first GenAI assistant, that now comes in several flavors. AWS is not known for its collaboration software portfolio, unlike competitors Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. However, AWS’ taking a leap by creating its first ever AI-powered assistant, which became generally available this year, shows just how many AI-related markets AWS is willing to invest in for the future.

The Takeaway: The slew of AI innovations launched by AWS this year proves that the cloud giant could likely become the all-in-one AI giant some customers are looking for. The launch of Amazon Q shows AWS can quickly pivot its AI R&D resources to meet any hot market that sprouts up in the industry.

No. 4: AWS’ $8 Billion Bet On Anthropic

In 2024, AWS made it clear that it was placing its AI startup bet on Anthropic.

In November, Amazon said it would invest an additional $4 billion into the AI startup, while Anthropic named AWS as its new primary AI training partner.

Amazon had previously invested $4 billion in Anthropic through 2023 and early 2024, making Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic a whopping $8 billion.

“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said AWS’ Garman. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.”

Anthropic Claude is one of the most popular AI models in the market. Anthropic now plans to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. Anthropic and AWS also agreed to give AWS customers early access to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic models.

The Takeaway: AWS made the decision this year that it will co-innovate and invest billions in Anthropic. In 2025, AWS and Anthropic will likely try to out-innovate Microsoft and OpenAI.

No. 3: CEO Adam Selipsky Suddenly Leaves

After 15 years with AWS, including three as CEO, Adam Selipsky exited the company – to the shock of many – in 2024.

“In the back of my head I thought there might be another chapter down the road at some point, but I never wanted to distract myself from what we are all working so hard to achieve,” Selipsky said when announcing his decision to leave AWS. “Given the state of the business and the leadership team, now is an appropriate moment for me to make this transition, and to take the opportunity to spend more time with family for a while, recharge a bit, and create some mental free space to reflect and consider the possibilities.”

Selipsky had been leading AWS since May 2021. He first joined AWS during its inception in 2005 as vice president of worldwide marketing, sales and support.

During his tenure as CEO, Selipsky increased AWS sales to an annual run rate of more than $100 billion and drove innovation, particularly around AI, in his three years as CEO.

Selipsky was one of the first vice presidents AWS hired back in 2005. He spent 11 years leading AWS sales, marketing and support before leaving to become CEO of data analytics provider Tableau. He left Tableau in 2021 to rejoin AWS as CEO.

He officially left the company on June 3 to let AWS veteran Matt Garman take over the reins.

“Matt and the AWS leadership team are ready for this next big opportunity,” Selipsky said. “I’m excited to see what they and you do next because I know it will be impressive. The future is bright for AWS (and for Amazon).”

As of mid-December, Selipsky has yet to unveil what his next move will be. “I’m looking forward to taking some time off with family, while taking the opportunity to think about my next adventure,” he said in May.

The Takeaway: The IT industry was shocked by the sudden exit of Selipsky as AWS was, and still is, in great financial and market shape. The big question that remains is where will Selipsky choose to work when he reenters the tech world.

No. 2: AWS AI Strategy Is Working For Partners

If AWS failed to provide channel partners with the right training, resources, incentives and co-innovation strategy, the company would not be able to achieve much success in the AI world.

AWS is a dominant AI force with a large customer base because early-on it leaned into partners to lead and shape its overall AI strategy.

“I’m encouraging every single one of our accounts to make sure that partners are attached to almost every single thing that we do,” AWS CEO Matt Garman told CRN this year, adding that he views partners now as “co-inventors with us.”

Partners are cheering Garman’s channel investments as AWS’ new CEO—such as signing dozens of heavily funded Strategic Collaboration Agreements with partners and creating an AI innovation center full of solution provider IP—along with his bold strategy to align AWS’ internal sales teams with the channel more than ever before.

“Partners are an incredibly important relationship for us and for our customers because we know that at the scale that we’re trying to grow and the scale that we’re trying to help our customers modernize, we don’t have enough humans in order to do that,” said Garman. “We want to build great software services and cloud services, but we need those partners to help go and actually make that happen all around the world.”

The Takeaway: It cannot be overstated how important it is for AWS’ overall AI strategy and go-to-market to be aligned to partners as the majority of AWS customers completely depend on partners for all their AI needs—from consulting and advisory services to system integrations and management of the AI solution to align with business outcomes. Garman’s actions and AWS changes to partner programs and co-selling has set AWS up to be a world leader in AI through a successful partner-centric strategy.

No. 1: AWS Picks New CEO In Company Veteran Matt Garman

Although the IT world was shocked by the sudden resignation of AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, partners quickly breathed a sigh of relief when AWS said Matt Garman would be taking over the company.

“Matt Garman is going to crush it,” said Justin Copie, CEO of top AWS partner Innovative Solutions when news broke of Selipsky’s exit. “Matt is a remarkable sales leader and he understands where customers are going to buy. … If you have somebody at the helm who realizes that customers are going to be buying differently in the future, that customers value certain things being sold now, that the product stack fits correctly in a certain way, Matt can make really good decisions for AWS to continue to grow—certainly in the AI space, as well as evolve the compute business.”

Garman is a 19-year AWS veteran.

He joined Amazon as a software development product manager for EC2 in 2006. Garman worked his way up the ranks at AWS, including in roles like vice president of AWS Compute Services, before being appointed senior vice president of AWS sales, marketing and global services in 2020.

“I am more optimistic than I have ever been for the potential for innovation and growth ahead of us, and I look forward to helping us move faster, invent more, and operate as one team to help our customers,” said Garman when he was named CEO in May.

“For me, AWS is much more than just a business,” he said. “We are a team of missionaries working passionately to help make our customers’ lives and businesses better every day.”

The Takeaway: AWS selected a new leader who knows the ins and outs of Amazon—from sales and marketing to innovation and channel partners. Matt Garman appears to be the right man who will lead the next phase of growth at AWS.