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Hyperscaler capex grew 190% from 2024 to 2026; their hardware suppliers grew 45%. That gap is why every throttling notice, plan change, and Sora shutdown traces back to the same constraint. The less-discussed dimension: agentic systems need 1 CPU per GPU versus 1:12 for chatbots, which is why Intel has doubled in six months and why every agent platform deck needs a CPU supply slide.
GeekWire's oral history buries the competitive signal inside the nostalgia: AWS customers are bypassing Bedrock to call Anthropic directly, which means the fastest-growing AWS service ever may be growing on committed-spend burn-down, not organic AI workload choice. The $200B capex bet and Jassy's $600B revenue target are Amazon paying to stay relevant at a stack layer it used to own; the structural question is whether AWS becomes a platform or a utility as models become the new developer interface. Azure at $75B (34% growth), Google Cloud at $50B, and the OpenAI deal at 16x Microsoft's per-point cost all point the same direction: the cloud market AWS created is converging, and custom silicon is the last defensible layer.
