Amazon’s ( AMZN-Q ) $38 billion cloud deal with OpenAI marks a major endorsement for the e-commerce giant’s cloud business after recent setbacks, including ceding market share to rivals and an outage that disrupted large parts of the internet.

After years of leading the cloud computing industry with its highly profitable Amazon Web Services business, Amazon has watched Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google snatch big-ticket contracts with their AI-steeped clouds.

Its lead in the cloud market slipped to 29% as of September, from 34% a few months before ChatGPT was launched in 2022, according to data from Synergy Research Group.

Amazon was considered a laggard in the AI race by many investors because it was late to launch a flagship large language model and for failing to offer a consumer-fac

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