Amazon’s ‘Ironman’ to Take On Google, Microsoft in AI

Amazon Web Services is mounting a broad push to upgrade its artificial intelligence products, which includes building its own technology and working closely with several AI startups, according to multiple people with knowledge of AWS’ plans. AWS is hoping to shore up a rare weak spot against competitors like Google and Microsoft and win more AI business.

Central to the AI push is a program, code-named “Ironman,” which includes a new AWS cloud “data warehouse” service that collects data from multiple sources within a company and stores it in a central location. AWS launched a data warehouse service five years ago, which rearranges how data is stored to make certain queries faster. Ironman is an AI-specific upgrade that is designed to process massive amounts of data for use in machine learning computing jobs, said two people with knowledge of the program.