From its $100 billion Anthropic deal and OpenAI partnership to launching new partner incentives and hiring top Microsoft executives, here are the top 10 AWS news stories of 2026 so far.
From AWS layoffs and its data centers in the Middle East being attacked by drones to launching a slew of new AI innovation on a nearly daily basis, Amazon Web Services has made news headlines throughout 2026.
The $150 billion company made massive AI gains this year via blockbuster deals and partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic as AWS strives to become a leader in AI models, chips and agents.
For AWS partners, 2026 has been a year to remember as the Seattle-based company launched new financial incentives and direct cash opportunities for partners driving business outcomes for customers with AI.
CRN breaks down the top 10 AWS news stories of 2026—from Anthropic’s $100 billion AWS investment to hiring some of Microsoft’s top executives.
AWS Market Share In 2026, $150 Billion Run Rate
Before jumping into the 10 biggest AWS stories of 2026, here is a look at the company’s most recent financial results and current cloud market-share standings.
AWS is the worldwide cloud market-share leader, currently owning 28 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure services market as of first-quarter 2026. Microsoft ranks No. 2 at 21 percent share, followed by Google Cloud at 14 percent share.
AWS generated $37.6 billion in revenue during the first quarter, representing a 28 percent sales increase year over year.
This means AWS has a $150 billion run rate in 2026. Here are the 10 AWS stories you need to know about.
No. 10: AWS Data Center Outages During War
One of the most serious AWS news stories this year was drone attacks on AWS data centers in the Middle East after the start of the U.S., Israel and Iran war.
Several AWS data centers in the Middle East were hit by drone strikes in early March as the war began, which knocked out power in AWS facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in early March.
A few weeks later, AWS’ data centers in the region were disrupted once again by ongoing drone activity that impacted Amazon infrastructure. This forced AWS customers to move workloads to other Amazon data centers.
The Takeaway: Although the drone attack caused service disruption for days, AWS resolved the issue quickly and made sure clients were all backed up. This shows that AWS can handle an unexpected massive disruption with little customer impact.
No. 9: Anthropic Commits $100 Billion To AWS
Anthropic has become one of the biggest players in the AI world thanks to innovation like Claude.
Although Anthropic competes with AWS, the AI startup signed a $100 billion agreement with AWS to secure up to 5 GW of capacity for training and deploying Claude.
Anthropic’s $100 billion commitment to AWS spans Graviton and Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, with the option to purchase future generations of AWS custom silicon as they become available.
The two companies also deepened their partnership by enabling Claude to run on Amazon Bedrock. The full Claude Platform will become available directly within AWS later this year.
Amazon, for its part, will invest $5 billion in Anthropic with up to an additional $20 billion in the future.
The Takeaway: One of the hottest AI companies on the planet, with an upcoming IPO in 2026, placed its AI chip and infrastructure bet on AWS this year. This $100 billion deal is a major win for AWS across the board.
No. 8: Amazon’s 16,000 Layoffs Impact AWS Employees In North America
In 2025, AWS was not affected by any large layoff round.
However, AWS employees were impacted by Amazon’s 16,000-employee layoff round in early 2026, which focused mostly on corporate employees, not warehouse or delivery employees.
AWS employees in America and Canada were hit, including in the company’s home state of Washington, where 2,200 employees—mostly in technical roles such as software developers, engineers and various product managers—were let go.
Some of the most significant employee reductions were Software Development Engineer I, Software Development Engineer II and Software Development Engineer III roles. After software developers, some of the most significant layoffs came via product and project managers, as well as engineers.
Hundreds of managers were terminated, including customer success managers, risk managers, technical program managers, project and product managers, software development managers and partner sales managers.
The Takeaway: AWS has said the layoffs were part of the company’s ambition to act like the world’s largest startup.
No. 7: AWS Business Value Realization Motion And Competency
In a move to financially reward AWS channel partners that are driving business outcomes for customers, the company introduced its Business Value Realization (BVR) motion along with a new BVR Competency.
“BVR gives partners the framework to close [business outcome] gaps systematically with industry benchmarks, ROI models, change management playbooks and funding tied directly to customer outcomes,” Bhargs Srivathsan, AWS’ director of customer and partner success, told CRN this year.
“So it’s not about delivering milestones, but business outcomes,” Srivathsan told CRN. “It’s a structured post-deployment framework that ensures customers actually achieve the business outcomes their cloud and AI investments were meant to deliver.”
AWS’ new BVR motion grants partners outcome-based funding, playbooks, benchmarks and specialized support after deployment.
Partners that demonstrate excellence in customer outcomes can earn AWS’ new BVR Competency.
The competency is an AWS specialization that signals to customers that a partner doesn’t just deploy AI but delivers business outcomes.
“In the AI era, the partners who win won’t be the fastest to deploy. They’ll be the ones who can prove it worked,” said Srivathsan.
The Takeaway: AWS is making it clear to its 140,000-strong channel partner ecosystem that simply deploying AI won’t be enough. Partners will reap financial rewards, margins and better co-selling opportunities if they can prove that their AI solution benefited the customer.
No. 6: Amazon’s $200 Billion CapEx Spending Plan ‘Predominantly In AWS’ In 2026
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is betting $200 billion on AI infrastructure and data centers in 2026.
“We expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon, but predominantly in AWS because we have very high demand; customers really want AWS for core and AI workloads, and we’re monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it,” said Jassy earlier this year.
Amazon’s CEO said AI revenue for AWS has hit a $15 billion annual run rate, while its internal chip business is generating over $20 billion a year.
“We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in CapEx in 2026 on a hunch,” Jassy said in a letter to shareholders in April.
“Of the AWS CapEx we expect to spend in 2026, much of which will be monetized in 2027-2028; we already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it,” he added.
The Takeaway: AWS customers and partners should feel confident that parent company Amazon is investing more in AWS and AI innovation compared with anything else it owns. Jassy, who is the former CEO of AWS, knows how important AWS is in the AI era and is fueling it with nearly unlimited funding.
No. 5: New AWS AI Chips Top Of Mind
Amazon’s own chip business (including Graviton CPUs, Trainium AI chips, Nitro cards and more) has surpassed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate.
This year, AWS said its chip business is growing by triple-digit percentages year over year, with Trainium itself being a multibillion-dollar annualized run-rate business.
“We’re seeing very strong demand for Trainium3 and expect nearly all of our Trainium3 supply of chips to be committed by mid-2026,” said AWS CEO Matt Garman in February.
“We’re just in the process of building Trainium4,” he said. “There’s very substantial interest in Trainium4, which is coming in 2027, and we’re already having conversations about Trainium5.”
In 2026, AWS launched its newest CPUs Graviton5, as well as Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers that are designed for AI models and agentic AI applications.
The Takeaway: Both Amazon and AWS CEOs are striking while the iron is hot as demand for compute capacity, chips and infrastructure is at an all-time high in the AI era. Garman and Jassy are trying to compete with the Nvidias of the world now right now and have the funding and workforce to do it.
No. 4: 5 Big AWS Hires And Departures
Here are some of AWS’ biggest hires and departures of 2026.
Hire: AWS hired Microsoft’s former corporate vice president of security and AI, Shawn Bice, to drive the AWS agentic AI services charge and to make AI agents more accurate. Bice has over 20 years of Microsoft experience, helping build and lead key areas such as Microsoft Security Copilot and AI Security Research, as well as Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. Bice is now vice president of AWS AI Services.
Departure: AWS lost its vice president of AI sales, Scott Rosecrans, who left to become OpenAI’s vice president of strategic pursuits. However, Rosecrans was picked by OpenAI to work directly with AWS. “Excited to get to work with my former friends and colleagues from AWS again and even more excited to see what customers build next,” Rosecrans wrote on LinkedIn after joining OpenAI.
Hire: AWS hired Microsoft Teams’ founding member and Microsoft innovator, Jigar Thakkar, as the leader of its new Amazon Quick product. The 19-year Microsoft executive was a founding member of Microsoft Teams and helped lead Skype for Business engineering as corporate vice president. As the new vice president of Agentic AI for Business and Amazon Quick, Thakkar will lead AWS’ team in building out a portfolio of agentic applications and services designed for business users.
Departure: Bryan Davis, AWS director of financial services for North America and leader of AWS global sales, left AWS to join Ab Initio Software. Davis was a nine-year AWS executive responsible for leading and developing North American sales and go-to-market. He was also responsible for AWS’ U.S. Financial Services Sales organization and the development and execution of strategic priorities and initiatives.
Hire: AWS hired former DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor as its new vice president of cybersecurity services and observability to elevate security in its ever-growing AI portfolio. Kapoor was also the former CEO of Apigee, an innovative API management and predictive analytics software provider, which Google acquired for $625 million in 2016.
The Takeaway: AWS is hiring top Microsoft innovators this year to help drive its AI strategy. AWS executives, for their part, are willing to leave for AI superstars like OpenAI.
No. 3: AWS Integrates With OpenAI Models, Invests $50 Billion In OpenAI
AWS and OpenAI vastly expanded their partnership in 2026, including technology integration and billions in investment.
AWS customers can now access OpenAI’s most advanced frontier models—GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4—as well as its coding agent, Codex, on Amazon Bedrock.
The two AI giants also unveiled Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, optimized for building agentic solutions with OpenAI frontier models and agentic capabilities on AWS.
In another big move in 2026, AWS is allowing customers to apply OpenAI model usage toward their existing AWS cloud commitments and consolidate AI spend alongside their broader AWS workloads.
OpenAI and Amazon are now collaborating to develop customized models available to Amazon developers to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications.
AWS said it will invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion, when certain conditions are met.
The Takeaway: For the first time, AWS and OpenAI are now innovating together for customers. Expect more OpenAI capabilities on AWS later this year as AWS gives its partners more AI to sell.
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No. 2: AI Partner Push, Programs
From paying partners direct cash benefits for delivering managed services to a new Partner Greenfield Program and AI capabilities throughout Partner Central, there has been no shortage of channel funding on AWS’ part in 2026.
For the first time, AWS began paying partners direct cash benefits in 2026 for delivering managed services that provide a business outcome for a customer.
AWS also has launched a unified, revamped Partner Central hub powered by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore with AI agents that work 24×7. The platform automates opportunity management, surfaces real-time funding eligibility, and eliminates administrative friction that slows deals.
The company launched a new Partner Greenfield Program that provides a predictable blueprint that combines enablement, funding and co-sell support to help partners prospect, activate and grow new AWS customers.
AWS also introduced a new AI Assessment Fund to accelerate AI pipeline development for partners that build qualified pipeline, accelerate deal velocity, and shorten the path from AI interest to AI project. AWS provides performance-based funding for partners to deliver these structured AI assessment engagements.
In another channel win, AWS modernized its Partner Central Platform with new agentic AI capabilities. AWS partners can now leverage AI agents to speed up their funding eligibility, administration efficiency and to better guide actions across co-selling opportunities via new agentic AI innovation inside AWS’ revamped Partner Central hub.
The Takeaway: AWS is pouring money into partners in 2026 that drive AI business outcomes for clients. AWS is also integrating its own AI tools into channel programs, hubs and other tools partners use to make deals and opportunities move faster.
No. 1: AI Innovation Going Full Throttle
AWS has been on an absolute tear this year in terms of launching new or enhanced AI platforms, chips, tools and agentic AI products as the company invests billions into driving AI into production for thousands of customers.
Backed by $200 billion in CapEx funding and an R&D budget focused on AI, AWS launched new AI innovation on a near-daily basis in 2026.
Some of the biggest launches include the company’s new agentic platform for building, deploying and operating agents at scale using any framework, model or protocol: AWS Bedrock AgentCore.
AWS continues to launch new capabilities for AgentCore such as AgentCore Web Search, a new tool that lets agents get information from the web without infrastructure overhead; Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base that connects to a company’s unstructured data sources; and integrating AgentCore with AWS Bedrock Guardrails, which evaluates every agent action for prompt injection attempts, harmful content and sensitive data exposure.
In the month of June alone, the company launched AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities; new autonomous agents inside Amazon Quick; its AWS Strands open-source toolkit for building production agents; and AWS Context, which automatically maps the relationships across existing data into a knowledge graph and provides agentic search, to name a few.
In addition, AWS planted its stake in the ground to be an open AI model provider, enabling customers to use the most popular third-party AI models on top of AWS.
The Takeaway: AWS launched hundreds of new AI capabilities and products this year, and we’re only halfway through 2026. One thing is for sure, AWS is going full steam ahead this year in its push to become a leading AI provider with a focus on unlocking business value for customers.
