The Chip Wars: Because Your CPU Needs an Identity Crisis

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky took the stage to unveil the Graviton4 processor, which he described as 'the most powerful and energy-efficient chip we've ever built for the cloud.' Translation: It's the most powerful and energy-efficient chip they've ever built, so they can keep more of the profit margin while you enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of using 'custom silicon.' The chip promises 40% better performance than Graviton3, which promised 40% better performance than Graviton2, in a beautiful demonstration of the tech industry's favorite game: incremental improvement rebranded as revolution.

The best part? AWS is so confident in Graviton4 that they're already taking pre-orders for Graviton5, which will be 40% better at making you forget what Graviton4 was supposed to do. It's like Moore's Law, but with more marketing slides and less actual law.

Trainium2: For When Your AI Model Needs Therapy

Not content with just running your applications, AWS also announced Trainium2, their latest AI training chip. According to AWS, it can train models 'up to 4x faster' than previous generations. What they don't mention is that it also generates existential dread 4x faster, as your AI model realizes it's being trained on a chip named after a muscle and starts questioning its purpose in life.

'With Trainium2, customers can train larger models with lower cost and higher efficiency,' an AWS spokesperson said, carefully avoiding the question of whether we actually need larger models, or if we're just building them because the chips exist. It's the cloud equivalent of 'if you build it, they will come,' except 'they' are venture capitalists and 'it' is another billion-parameter model that can write mediocre poetry.

AI Services: Solving Problems That Definitely Exist

The real star of the show was, of course, AI—or as AWS calls it, 'Amazon's Intelligent [Insert Noun Here].' The company announced so many AI services that I'm pretty sure there's now an AI for managing your other AIs, which itself is managed by an AI that reports to Jeff Bezos in his space yacht.

Amazon Q Developer: Your New Overpriced Intern

Amazon Q Developer promises to 'accelerate software development' by generating code, debugging, and 'optimizing AWS costs.' Let's unpack that last one: An AI, running on AWS infrastructure that you pay for, will analyze your AWS usage that you pay for, to suggest ways to reduce your AWS bill that you pay for. It's the circle of life, cloud-style.

Early testers report that Q Developer is 'surprisingly good at writing boilerplate code' and 'alarmingly good at suggesting you use more AWS services.' One developer told me, 'I asked it to optimize my database queries, and it suggested migrating to Amazon Aurora, DynamoDB, and Redshift—simultaneously. My bill now has its own ZIP code.'

Bedrock Gets More Foundation-y

AWS Bedrock, their managed service for foundation models, now supports 'custom model imports,' which is tech-speak for 'please bring your expensive AI models to our playground so we can charge you for the swings.' They've also added 'guardrails'—not the kind that prevent you from falling off a cliff, but the kind that prevent your AI from saying naughty words, which is arguably more important in today's corporate environment.

The most telling announcement? 'Model evaluation on Bedrock,' where AWS will help you evaluate whether your AI model is any good. It's like paying the restaurant to tell you if you enjoy your meal. The evaluation is, of course, performed by another AI model, creating an infinite regression of AIs judging AIs until someone remembers what humans are for.

Serverless Everything: Because Managing Servers is So 2024

AWS announced 'serverless' versions of pretty much everything that wasn't already serverless, including 'Amazon Redshift Serverless' (for when your data warehouse needs to be even more abstract) and 'Amazon MSK Serverless' (for when your Kafka clusters need to be less cluster-y).

The beauty of 'serverless' is that it doesn't mean there are no servers—it means you don't know where the servers are, who's managing them, or how much they'll cost until you get the bill. It's the cloud equivalent of a mystery box, except instead of a fun surprise, you get an invoice that makes you question your life choices.

AWS executives described this as 'democratizing access to advanced technologies,' which is corporate speak for 'we've hidden the complexity so well that even your intern can accidentally provision a service that costs more than their salary.'

The Real Innovation: New Ways to Say 'You Owe Us Money'

Beneath all the AI hype and chip announcements, the most consistent theme at re:Invent 2025 was AWS's relentless focus on what they do best: creating services that lock you deeper into their ecosystem while making it sound like they're doing you a favor.

Consider the new 'AWS Supply Chain' service, which promises to 'unify your supply chain data.' Because nothing says 'innovation' like taking the same data you already have, putting it in Amazon's database, and charging you monthly for the privilege. Or 'Amazon Security Lake,' which is basically a data lake for security logs—a solution to the problem of having too many security tools, created by a company that sells you most of those tools.

It's a brilliant business model: First, create complexity (hundreds of services, each with their own pricing model). Then, sell solutions to manage that complexity (cost management tools, security services, monitoring platforms). Finally, create AI tools to help you understand why you need all the previous tools. It's the tech equivalent of a snake eating its own tail, except the snake is made of money and the tail is your IT budget.