TLDR: AWS is significantly expanding its AI capabilities and market reach through strategic partnerships with OpenAI and CrowdStrike, as highlighted by Ruba Borno, AWS’s global channel chief. These collaborations aim to provide customers with diverse AI model choices and enhance cybersecurity solutions, contributing to AWS’s multi-billion dollar AI business which is experiencing rapid growth. The company’s ‘end-to-end AI’ strategy, including investments in custom chips and an Agent Marketplace, positions it for continued leadership in the evolving AI landscape.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is aggressively strengthening its position in the artificial intelligence (AI) market through pivotal partnerships with OpenAI and cybersecurity leader CrowdStrike, according to Ruba Borno, AWS Vice President of Global Specialists and Partners. Borno emphasized that these collaborations are central to AWS’s ‘end-to-end AI’ strategy, designed to offer customers unparalleled choice and bolster the company’s competitive edge.
AWS’s AI business is currently a ‘multibillion-dollar ARR business that’s growing at really high rates,’ with partners playing a crucial role in this expansion, Borno told CRN. She described the AI opportunity as the ‘biggest opportunity for the entire industry and, frankly, for any industry since the internet,’ noting that the pace of innovation is ‘moving faster than even the most optimistic person can think it’s moving at.’
The partnership with OpenAI involves onboarding OpenAI’s new foundational models, GPT OSS 120B and GPT OSS 20B, to AWS. This move is a continuation of AWS’s commitment to ‘AI model choice for our customers,’ making ‘more powerful AI technologies into the hands of our customers to expand the impact of OpenAI’s technology by making it available to now millions of customers on AWS.’ These models will be accessible via Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Sagemaker, enabling advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, coding, mathematical problem-solving, and scientific analysis. AWS also supports its own Nova family of models and Anthropic’s Claude 4 models on Amazon Bedrock, ensuring a broad selection for diverse customer needs.
On the cybersecurity front, the enhanced partnership with CrowdStrike is set to drive increased cybersecurity sales and customer engagement for partners. Borno expressed excitement about the collaboration, stating, ‘I’m really excited about the CrowdStrike partnership in being able to look at a customer’s security posture holistically.’ CrowdStrike has been a long-standing partner, notably crossing $1 billion in total contract value (TCV) on the AWS Marketplace in 2024 alone.
Beyond OpenAI and CrowdStrike, AWS is also investing in significant partnerships with Oracle and SAP. The Oracle Database@AWS offering is now generally available in multiple regions, facilitating cloud migration for large enterprises, multinationals, and regulated industries, particularly to leverage generative AI capabilities. Additionally, the AWS and SAP AI Co-innovation Program, launched in May, aims to unlock value from business data accessed through SAP, allowing customers to build secure GenAI applications with Amazon Bedrock using their critical SAP data, with partners like Accenture and Deloitte already engaged.
AWS’s market differentiation in generative AI and agentic AI stems from its comprehensive approach to the entire AI stack. This includes investments in custom chips like Trainium and Inferentia, collaborations with partners such as Nvidia, Intel, and AMD, and the development of Amazon Bedrock Agentcore and an AI Agent Marketplace. The Agent Marketplace, which launched with over 1,000 agents, allows customers to discover, evaluate, procure, and deploy AI agents from various partners for specific use cases, streamlining the workflow from problem statement to solution deployment.
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Financially, AWS reported strong performance in the second quarter of 2025, with earnings of $30.9 billion. This represents a 17 percent year-over-year increase from $26.3 billion in Q2 2024, contributing to an impressive annual run rate of $124 billion. Borno, recently honored on CRN’s Top 25 Channel Sales Leaders of 2025 list, anticipates continued cloud and AI momentum throughout the remainder of 2025, underscoring AWS’s deep commitment to its growing partner network.
