The 13 percent year over year increase comes as AWS sales shot to $25 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s cloud division is now at a $100 billion annual revenue run rate — a sign companies are spending more on AI.
[ir.aboutamazon.com]
Sources tell The Wrap that the high costs stemmed from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s “chronic lateness,” along with inexperienced production execs:
“It should look like a $200 million-plus movie, but it doesn’t, because more than half goes to buyouts of the stars and the above the line,” the production insider said. “Amazon MGM have so many movies that nobody’s concentrating on what actually needs to get done. Given their volume, they can’t concentrate.”
The e-comm giant is betting you might. Shein, mostly known for its bargain bin fashion items, is now looking to sell more household items from established brands like Colgate-Palmolive or Hasbro. It’s part of a strategy to challenge Amazon as Shein looks to IPO later this year.
[The Business of Fashion]
Following a report by Puck’s John Ourand that ESPN has carved out a piece of the new NBA media landscape, The Athletic added an Amazon rumor:
It is expected that Prime Video’s package will include significant regular season and postseason games, perhaps even some conference finals. The anticipation is that the final contract will be for at least a decade and begin the 2025-2026 season.
If the deals go through, this might add streaming NBA games on Thursdays when Amazon’s NFL games aren’t on.
[The Athletic]
According to the WSJ, Amazon, YouTube, and Peacock are all in the mix alongside incumbents Warner and Disney, with the possibility of snagging global streaming rights for some games.
When these deals kick in after 2024-2025, they’ll exist alongside the three-headed effort from Disney, Fox, and WBD, standalone ESPN, Netflix and the WWE, the NBA’s FAST channel and who knows what else.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK has started gathering comments from third parties about the partnerships between Microsoft and Mistral AI, Amazon and Anthropic, and Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection AI staff. This is the first phase of gathering information to see whether these deals “fall within UK merger rules and the impact that these arrangements could have on competition in the UK.”
People using Amazon’s AI library can check if an image was made with Amazon’s Titan Image Generator, which is now publicly available. Right now, the platform will only check Amazon’s own watermarks and not other developers.
Amazon also added the ability to customize guardrails and to bring people’s own models to Bedrock.
