According to media reports citing informed sources, U.S. e-commerce and cloud computing leader Amazon.com (AMZN.US) plans to launch an artificial intelligence content marketplace. Reports indicate that Amazon executives have informed publishing industry leaders about the initiative to create a large-scale content platform where publishers can publicly offer content licensing deals to technology companies developing AI products.
Prior to an official meeting of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud computing provider, the company distributed slides detailing the content marketplace to two internal sources who had discussed the project with Amazon management. The slides reportedly categorized the content marketplace alongside AWS's core AI tools and developer ecosystem platforms, including the exclusive offerings Bedrock and Quick Suite, and described how publishers could widely utilize these products in their operations.
Media reports note that publishers and AI technology companies are currently negotiating terms for using proprietary online content, whether for model training or generating standardized AI responses for users. Publishers are seeking usage-based fees, with pricing tiers that increase according to content consumption volume.
An Amazon spokesperson responded via email that the company "currently has no additional specific information to share on this topic," adding that Amazon maintains long-term partnerships with publishers and will continue to innovate collaboratively.
Last week, Microsoft (MSFT.US), Amazon's primary cloud computing competitor, announced it is developing a Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), which will serve as an AI licensing hub displaying usage terms set by publishers.
Amazon's move essentially uses a "content + AI" two-sided market mechanism to expand AWS's core value proposition within the AI ecosystem. On one hand, it provides content providers such as publishers with a legitimate, standardized channel to sell original content to AI product and model developers. On the other hand, it offers generative AI application and agent developers—including enterprise and cloud-native users—access to more reliable and regulated training data and knowledge sources.
This framework reduces legal and copyright risks associated with unauthorized content during AI training, while establishing a content licensing and usage value chain network fully controlled by AWS. This means AWS is not only providing computing power and infrastructure but also integrating into the value chain of core assets—the content itself—required for model training and inference systems.
AWS's dominant market share in cloud computing has enabled its AI application development ecosystem, Amazon Bedrock, to continuously attract enterprise clients seeking low-barrier, one-stop solutions for developing various AI applications. Amazon, along with other cloud leaders Microsoft and Google, is fully focused on building generative AI-focused ecosystems for both enterprise and consumer application developers, aiming to lower technical barriers for non-IT professionals across industries and provide powerful cloud AI computing platforms, particularly inference resources.
Technically, the development of AI models relies not only on computing power (such as training GPUs/TPUs) and algorithms, but also on high-quality, licensable training data. As generative AI becomes more widespread, copyright disputes and content providers' demands for usage-based fees are increasing. How content is legally integrated into cloud platforms and how it is billed have become critical variables affecting large-scale commercial deployment of AI.
Amazon hopes to standardize content licensing and usage tracking mechanisms through the AI content marketplace, providing reliable data inputs for AWS's AI developer service ecosystem (including Bedrock and Quick Suite), while enabling content rights holders to achieve sustainable revenue in the AI era. This is expected to significantly enhance AWS's position in the overall AI ecosystem and expand its revenue channels.
Since the beginning of the year, as global enterprise and consumer demand for practical AI applications—such as generative AI software, AI search, AI recommendations, and AI agents—has surged and begun large-scale implementation, Wall Street analysts have become increasingly optimistic about Amazon's potential for stronger growth in e-commerce and AWS. They anticipate that AWS revenue and operating profit growth could reach levels comparable to the cloud computing boom around 2015, potentially exceeding 40%.
Advancements in the Gemini 3 series and the popularity of models like Claude and OpenClaw in programming and agent-based applications have accelerated the adoption of generative AI in both enterprise and consumer contexts. This shift is driving computing demand from training toward broader inference and online services, thereby significantly boosting global cloud infrastructure and PaaS AI developer ecosystem growth.
In this context, Wall Street views Amazon's "e-commerce + AWS" combination as well-positioned for strong growth similar to Nvidia's trajectory. AWS has already shown signs of reacceleration, with Q3 2025 sales increasing 20% year-over-year, and securing a long-term major contract with OpenAI (reportedly around $400 billion) has enhanced visibility for cloud infrastructure and AI inference demand. The market is also trading on the narrative of broader adoption of AWS's proprietary Trainium AI ASIC computing clusters.
In Amazon's recently announced massive capital expenditure plan, AWS and AI businesses account for a key share. After investing approximately $1000 billion in 2025, Amazon plans to allocate around $2000 billion in 2026 toward cloud infrastructure and AI-related expenditures, including data center expansion, specialized chips, and AI service extensions.
This strategic investment direction aims not only to enhance underlying computing power and service performance but also signifies Amazon's ambition to incorporate AI technology stacks, platform layers, and market layers into its comprehensive AI strategy. The launch of the AI content marketplace represents a critical extension of this strategy, transforming AWS from a mere infrastructure provider into a global leader offering a complete AI supply chain platform covering computing infrastructure, models, and content developer ecosystems.
Such a platform model could strengthen AWS's ability to lock in enterprise customers and developers, increase customer loyalty and long-term revenue growth potential, and build deeper ecosystem barriers in the competitive AI commercialization landscape.
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