AWS's operating margins are rising because of a growing mix of token-as-a-service (Bedrock) driven by Anthropic, which has much higher margins than GPU-as-a-service. Amazon's workload mix advantage allows it to expand margins even during massive capacity expansion, unlike competitors facing margin pressure from asset-heavy GPU service models.
Meta's compute neocloud strategy gives it a backstop for its massive AI capex. If its own model (MSL) doesn't succeed, Meta can lease GPU capacity to AI labs at premium rates, providing investors confidence and enabling continued aggressive capex spending in 2027 and beyond.
Token-as-a-service through hyperscalers like AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry is a very popular and attractive channel for enterprises, especially regulated industries like financial services, because they can buy AI tokens through existing cloud vendor relationships and burn down committed credits. This should drive significant growth for AWS and Azure as token spending shifts towards enterprise.