How the World Got Wired · The Cloud

Three Companies, One Industry

I should mention that AWS is not the only one. There are two other major American cloud companies.

One is Microsoft Azure, run by Microsoft, the company that for years dominated the personal computer industry and that, under newer leadership, became a serious cloud provider starting in the 2010s. Azure is the second-largest of the major cloud providers, and especially strong with big traditional companies — banks, governments, retailers — that already used Microsoft software.

The other is Google Cloud, run by Google (the company you met in Chapter 14). Google Cloud is the third-largest. It has unique strengths in certain technical areas, particularly artificial intelligence, because Google has been doing AI research longer than almost anyone else and has built specialized hardware for it.

Together, these three companies — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — own a very large share of the world’s commercial computing capacity. Several smaller cloud providers exist. New ones, especially focused on the new AI workloads, have appeared in the last few years (a company called CoreWeave, for example, that you may hear more about). But for the most part, when a serious company says it is “moving to the cloud,” it means moving to one of those three American companies.

Three American companies. The companies whose servers, by lawful subpoena, the United States government can usually compel to hand over data. The companies whose buildings are powered by American electricity, cooled by American water, staffed by American workers (and, by their many international employees, but under American regulation).

You should remember this, because in the next part of the book, we are going to meet a new generation of companies — the artificial intelligence companies — that mostly run, today, on these same three companies’ clouds. Anthropic. OpenAI. Many of the others. Their breakthroughs happen on rented warehouses of computers owned by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. The age of giant private wealth being built on top of cheap infrastructure is, you will see, very much still with us.

Part V

This is the end of Part IV of this book. The part about the giants.

Over the last several chapters, you have met the companies that grew up after the dot-com bust, on the cheap infrastructure left behind by Global Crossing and WorldCom and Nortel, and that have come to define the internet you live inside. Amazon and its retail empire. Google and its advertising empire. Apple and its iPhone. Facebook and its social graph (now Meta, with Instagram and WhatsApp). ByteDance and TikTok and the splinternet. And AWS, quietly, underneath everything, renting computers to almost everybody.

These are, today, called the Magnificent Seven by people who follow the stock market, though the list shifts depending on who is counting. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is Google’s parent company), Amazon, Meta, Nvidia (which we will meet in Part V), and Tesla (which is mostly a car company that we won’t really discuss in this book). Together, these seven companies make up roughly a third of the entire United States stock market. Each one of them is, by itself, worth more than the total wealth of most countries. Their decisions shape what billions of people see, what they buy, what they argue about, and what they hope for, every single day.

How did all of this happen on top of foundations that were originally given away for free?

That is the question you have been holding since Chapter 6. It does not have a single answer. But you have seen the pattern by now. The foundations — TCP/IP, the web, the cables, the protocols — were paid for by public money and released, as gifts, to the world. The towers that were built on those foundations were not gifts. They were companies. They were businesses. They were owned by specific people, who became, by owning them, the richest in history.

This is the world your generation has inherited.

The last part of this book is about what is being built right now, on top of all of it.

It is about artificial intelligence — the kind of machines that can answer your questions, write your school assignments if you let them, drive cars, recognize faces, paint pictures, compose music, and, increasingly, do many of the things human beings used to think only human beings could do.

It is about a quiet office, in a building near Washington, D.C., that has been funding research on machines that learn since before most of the engineers you read about in this book were born.

It is about a British-Canadian scientist who refused to take money from that office, and who, more than any other single person, made the current AI revolution possible.

And it is about what your generation will have to decide, in the years just ahead, about who builds these new machines, who owns them, who pays for them, and what they should be allowed to do.

That’s Part V. It starts in the next chapter.

It starts in Arlington, Virginia.

All 24 chapters of How the World Got Wired · Library · All courses