aws
PLATFORM ENGINEERING & GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE
STRATEGIC MEMORANDUM
Cloud Architecture & Enterprise Acceleration
TO:
AWS Leadership Team, Infrastructure Engineers, Enterprise Solutions Architects &
Product Leads
FROM:
Matt Garman, Chief Executive O
ffi
cer & AWS Infrastructure Operations
DATE:
September 18, 2026
SUBJECT:
Amazon AWS Platform Strategy: Three-Layer AI Stack, Custom Silicon & Resilient
Infrastructure
1. PURPOSE & MARKET CONTEXT
Amazon Web Services pioneered hyperscale cloud computing and remains the world's most comprehensive and
broadly adopted cloud platform. As the computing landscape enters an AI-
fi
rst era, our long-term competitive moat is
driven by architectural breadth, silicon independence, and deep infrastructure reliability at unmatched global scale.
This strategy memorandum de
fi
nes our multi-year platform roadmap. It codi
fi
es our three-layer generative AI strategy,
directs capital investments toward custom in-house silicon (Trainium, Inferentia, Graviton), expands sovereign cloud
enclaves, and establishes operational discipline for enterprise mission-critical resiliency.
2. THREE-LAYER GENERATIVE AI PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE
Unlike single-model providers, AWS delivers enterprise choice across all three distinct layers of the AI technology
stack:
Bottom Layer (Foundational Infrastructure & Silicon):
Providing the most cost-effective compute for building and
training foundation models, anchored by Trainium and Inferentia custom ASICs alongside cutting-edge accelerated
GPU instances clustered via UltraClusters with 3,200 Gbps EFA networking.
Middle Layer (Model Choice & Tooling via Amazon Bedrock):
A fully managed service providing access to leading
foundation models (Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama, Mistral, Amazon Nova) through a single uni
fi
ed API with built-in
retrieval (RAG), agents, and enterprise guardrails.
Top Layer (Applications & Developer Assistants):
Delivering ready-to-use intelligent applications, prominently
spearheaded by Amazon Q, our generative AI assistant designed speci
fi
cally for developers, enterprise business
intelligence, and cloud operations.
Platform Tenet:
There will not be one model to rule the world. Enterprise builders require diverse foundation models
tuned for speci
fi
c accuracy, latency, and cost parameters. Our job is to make AWS the most
fl
exible, reliable, and cost-
effective cloud to build, customize, and deploy AI applications.
3. CUSTOM SILICON ADVANTAGE & TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP (TCO)
Custom silicon remains our primary lever for insulating customers from hardware supply crunches while delivering
superior price-performance. Graviton4 delivers up to 30% better compute performance than predecessor generations,
while Trainium2 provides up to 4x faster training performance for trillion-parameter foundation models at a 40%
reduction in training cost.
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
—
Con
fi
dential Internal Strategy Directive
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