“The Western world is very hungry for additional open models that are Western open models.” Andy Jassy said that on Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, in the same breath as he confirmed Chinese ones are coming to Bedrock.
The shift is clear enough. Bedrock, Amazon’s AI platform, now lists closed models from Anthropic and OpenAI next to open models such as Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM 5.3. Jassy also pointed to Grok 4.7 from Space Exploration Technologies Corp. SpaceXAI on the platform. GLM 5.3 arrived earlier this month, pitched at agentic coding and complex software engineering with AWS security and compliance protections. Jassy added that he believes Western open models will come “over time as well.”
Security as the selling point
Bedrock is a serverless service with one API for foundation models from several companies. It competes with Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud Platform. Amazon announced it on April 13, 2023, and opened it to general use on September 28 that year.
Jassy’s pitch is the wall around the models. Customer inputs and outputs, he said, are not shared with model providers or used to train their foundational models. Guardrails lets administrators set content filters and redact personally identifiable information across every model on the platform, and Knowledge Bases lets models pull facts from private data in Amazon S3.
Jassy called Bedrock’s potential “gigantic” and said it could end up comparable in scale to EC2. He expects six to eight models to handle more than 95% of workloads within two to three years.
Capacity and cash
What’s changing underneath is how tight compute has become. In an October podcast with Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg, Jassy said, “2027 is largely sold out,” and that a good chunk of 2028 is gone too. AWS leaves some room for on-demand customers, EC2 and Bedrock. Capacity for 2026 is gone entirely. In January, AWS raised Capacity Blocks for ML rates by about 15% across every region.
Cloud analyst David Linthicum pushed back on the headlines. “You can still go into the AWS console today and allocate GPU capacity for AI workloads,” he said, adding that pre-reserved hyperscale blocks are not the same as “AWS is sold out.” Developers on Reddit described scarce spot instances and hard-to-get on-demand capacity.
The quarter itself was strong. Revenue reached $201.9 billion, up 12%, and operating profit was $28.1 billion, a 13.9% margin and the highest in the company’s history. AWS revenue grew 39.3% to $46 billion, an annual pace of $184 billion. The worry is the spending. Amazon expects cash capital expenditures of approximately $220 billion for 2026, and free cash flow over the past 12 months was negative $42.4 billion, against a surplus of $14.8 billion a year earlier. The stock fell after the report, around $240.35. For the fourth quarter, Amazon guided to revenue of $240 billion to $247 billion and operating profit of $28.5 billion to $33.5 billion.
The China question
Chinese open models are rising fast, and Washington is split on what to do. Last week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said China is roughly six months behind the U.S. in AI, but warned that free products could still hand it a strategic advantage, especially in developing markets. He credited part of its progress to access to restricted advanced chips and to distillation of Western systems. In July, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called Chinese models “excellent” and argued Washington should use rather than ban high-quality open-source technology.
Watch this space: Amazon is betting that customers will take Kimi and GLM if they arrive behind Bedrock’s guardrails.
Sources
- Andy Jassy Says West Is 'Very Hungry' For More Western Open Source AI Models as Amazon Adds China's Kimi and GLM to Bedrock
- Amazon Bedrock
- Building an Agentic AI Platform on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | Amazon Web Services
- Amazon (AMZN) Q3 2026 Earnings Analysis | The Truth Behind the Free Cash Flow Deficit｜Timo＠ギャルエコノミスト
- AWS sells out committed cloud capacity through 2027, reserves on-demand headroom
- Northflank Breach: AI API Keys Abused, Rotate Secrets Now
Photo: Marques Thomas / Unsplash (Unsplash License)
