AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

The cloud giant talks loudest about what scares it most. Here's what should terrify it

For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't.

Multi-cloud meant a lowest-common-denominator architecture. Multi-cloud meant giving up the managed services, the security integrations, the features that justified the lock-in. Multi-cloud was for that indecisive tranche of companies that couldn't commit. And until 2019, mentioning other clouds at all was forbidden at AWS conferences.

Then in November 2025, AWS launched AWS Interconnect with Google Cloud as a launch partner, with Microsoft Azure joining in 2026. Just a bit of jiggery-pokery in the console to connect your VPC to a competitor's network, and boom: the thing they spent years telling you was a mistake is now productized and fully managed. AWS didn't change its mind, so much as get told by about 84 percent of its customers to shut up and get with the times.

The pattern

AWS has a tell: it markets hardest wherever it's losing.

• 2017: Machine learning. SageMaker launched with promises to "democratize ML" through "single-click model training." The keynotes were as breathless as they were incomprehensible. Meanwhile, Google's TensorFlow had already become the industry standard, and AWS was playing catch-up with a product most data scientists ignored. AWS trumpeted "250% user growth" the following year — impressive until you realize they were growing from approximately nobody.
• 2024-2025: Artificial intelligence. At re:Invent 2024, Bedrock would lead the generative AI revolution, touting a marketplace of one hundred models, multi-agent collaboration capabilities, and Nova foundation models with names that sound like car trim levels. The messaging was unambiguous: the AI future runs on AWS. But by mid-2025, the market had rendered its verdict. Internal documents obtained by Business Insider showed Bedrock hit "critical capacity constraints," pushing customers to competitors. Epic Games took a $10 million Fortnite project to Google Cloud because AWS couldn't provide sufficient quota. Thomson Reuters chose Google for its CoCounsel AI after finding Bedrock 15-30 percent slower. When you're losing eight-figure deals because you can't keep the lights on for your flagship AI product, the marketing isn't the problem.
• 2025: Multi-cloud. After years of resistance, AWS launched interconnect products with competitors, published guidance on "succeeding with a multicloud strategy," and quietly accepted what the market had been screaming: nobody wants to be locked in.

Each time, the pattern holds. The louder the marketing, the weaker the position.

The real threat isn't who you think

Here's the thing: Azure and Google aren't AWS's real problem.

The real problem is that developers don't choose AWS anymore (because honestly, given a choice between AWS and a vendor who thinks deeply about developer experience, who would?). They choose Vercel, or Netlify, or whatever their AI coding assistant suggests when they type "deploy this." Heck, I have Strong Opinions about this and even I get tired of wrestling with Claude Code's biases; just make the container work already.

These platforms run on AWS Lambda under the hood. The serverless functions, the edge compute, the CDN — they're AWS infrastructure, abstracted into invisibility. Users never see it, never need an AWS account, never learn what a VPC is. Why would they?

One platform comparison put it bluntly: "In 2026, most developers no longer ask 'How do I deploy this?' They ask 'Which button do I click to ship to prod?'"

I don't put my infrastructure on AWS. I put it wherever the tool I'm using wants to put it. Cursor suggests Vercel? Fine. Claude wants Netlify? Sure. The LLM is making the infrastructure decision now, and it's not optimizing for "which cloud provider has the best managed Kafka offering." Vercel charges a 15-20 percent premium over raw AWS pricing. Customers pay it gladly for faster deployments. The margin accrues to the abstraction layer. AWS gets the commodity revenue underneath.

The Lumen problem

Quick: name a Tier 1 internet backbone provider.

If you said Lumen, Cogent, Telia, or NTT, congratulations — you're in the tiny minority of people who think about this. These companies own the undersea cables connecting continents and operate the networks that carry 99 percent of international internet traffic. Nobody thinks about them.

Because all the interesting stuff rides on top of them. And the margins follow the interesting stuff.

AWS is on that path. Today they're running 33-39 percent operating margins — genuinely impressive, making AWS the engine that funds Amazon's everything else. But they're also losing roughly 2 percent market share annually to Azure and Google, and that's just the competition they can see.

The competition they can't see is the abstraction layer that makes them irrelevant to the people actually building software. Every developer who ships via Vercel without knowing what region their Lambda runs in is a developer who will never care about AWS's 347 services. Every AI coding assistant that defaults to "deploy to Netlify" is training the next generation to treat cloud providers like plumbing.

The memory hole

AWS spent 2024 promising an AI future that 95 percent of enterprises aren't seeing ROI on, according to MIT's "GenAI Divide" study. They spent 2025 quietly accepting the multi-cloud reality they'd fought for a decade. Now they're hoping you forgot.

Meanwhile, the October 2025 us-east-1 outage took down Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring doorbells, McDonald's mobile ordering, and Britain's tax website for fifteen hours (six and a half million Downdetector reports). It was the third major outage in five years from their oldest region. The institutional knowledge keeps walking out the door, and it shows.

But none of that matters if developers stop choosing AWS directly. In a world where nobody consciously selects their cloud provider, the only time AWS will have any relevance is when they fail. Outages become the brand.

AWS's destiny isn't to lose to Azure or Google. It's to win the infrastructure war and lose the relevance war. To become the next Lumen — the backbone nobody knows they're using, while the companies on top capture the margins and the mindshare.

The cables matter. But nobody's writing blog posts about them. ®