Do we like Amazon Web Services?
Cloud computing and AI infrastructure arm of Amazon, based in Seattle, Washington.
Our score: 5 out of 10. Mixed. It's a very capable and widely used service with decent water and efficiency numbers. Against that are rising emissions, big outages, layoffs and competition probes.
AWS is Amazon's cloud arm, and it quietly runs a big slice of the internet. It's now run by Matt Garman, who joined Amazon in 2005 as an MBA intern and became CEO in June 2024, after Andy Jassy and Adam Selipsky.
The big wobble was October 2025. A fault in the automation that manages DNS records for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region cascaded into a long outage. It wasn't a hack, and it took down apps such as Slack, Atlassian and Snapchat for many hours.
Regulators are circling. In 2025 the UK's CMA said competition in cloud isn't working well and recommended formal probes into AWS and Microsoft. AWS said the report ignores clear evidence of robust competition. The EU is also looking at whether to treat AWS as a gatekeeper. No fine has been reported yet.
On the environment it's a mixed picture. AWS says its data centres use far less water per unit of power than the industry average, and it published its absolute water use for the first time in 2025. But Amazon's overall emissions rose 16% in 2025, and Amazon is also cutting thousands of corporate jobs.