AWS CEO Matt GarmanGetty Images for HumanX ConferenceAmazon’s data centers have taken numerous hits since the war against Iran broke out. In early March, two AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates were directly struck by drones, while one in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike. The hits caused structural damage to the facilities, as well as water damage from putting out resulting fires. And last week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted an Amazon data center in Bahrain. The tech powerhouse says it’s working with local authorities on recovery efforts and advising its customers to migrate their data to other regions.Despite the recent troubles, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, still has high hopes for business in the Middle East.“We continue to be extremely bullish about our partnerships in the Middle East and about the long term potential of the region,” Garman tells Forbes. “Obviously there's conflicts going on there right now, which dampens the very short term aspects. And we think everybody hopes for a quick end to fighting, but it doesn't really dampen our long term views on the prospects of the region.”Garman says that the industry is “rethinking” cloud security as global conflict has increased. “We’ll think about anything we have to do,” Garman says. “The world went through a long period, starting before the Ukraine war, of not really having a lot of conflict between nations. And we see some of that ramping up.”His comments came hours before President Donald Trump declared a two-week ceasefire in Iran, after the nation said it would open up the Strait of Hormuz to ships for safe passage. Trump had earlier threatened wide-scale annihilation to Iran, posting on his social network Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Even so, both sides have issued threats to continue attacks if the ceasefire fell apart. When it comes to conflict zones, Garman extols the general virtues of the cloud, which allows customers to keep their data in more than one place and “avoid having all your eggs in one basket.” Since the data is decentralized, it lets clients move their data operations to different sites more quickly. “Otherwise they would have been down for months and months and months in conflict regions.”Garman, an almost 20 year Amazon veteran, joined the company as an intern in 2006 before Amazon Web Services even had a name. He rose through the ranks, from product manager to vice president, eventually becoming Senior Vice President of AWS Sales, Marketing and Global Services in 2020. Four years later, he was tapped as CEO of AWS. When Garman took the reins, AWS was still the leading cloud provider in the world, but when it came to AI, it was seen as ceding ground to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. To combat that perception, Garman immediately tried to appeal to young companies. “One of the very first things that I did was come out here to Silicon Valley and sit down with a bunch of startups and understand what they are doing.” So far the trajectory has been good: In his first six quarters as CEO, AWS tallied $185.1 billion in revenue, up 30% from the previous six quarters.AWS, now 20 years old, is a key part of Amazon’s evolving business in the AI era. The seemingly insatiable demand for compute has been the central economic force as generative AI has boomed. It has shot Nvidia’s market cap up to an eye-watering $4.5 trillion. Project Stargate, an effort by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build $500 billion worth of AI infrastructure in the U.S., has been a marquee tech initiative to kick off President Trump’s second term, though progress on the effort has reportedly stalled. All told, big tech could pour an estimated $500 billion into AI data centers and chips this year alone, according to a report by Goldman Sachs.The thirst for compute has also created a massive opportunity for alternatives to Nvidia: Chip startup Cerebras is valued at $23 billion after raising $1 billion in February, and it refiled with the SEC to go public after the process had stalled last year. SambaNova, another rival, had been in talks to be acquired by Intel, but pivoted to raise $350 million in February. And Groq, another next-gen chip company, sold to Nvidia for $20 billion on Christmas Eve, becoming a key element of the chip giant’s play in AI inference. Amazon’s own entrant into the silicon race is Trainium, a chip designed in house specifically for AI. After it was first released in 2020, the chip was criticized for poor performance. Garman admits there were issues, but not with the chip’s hardware. “That was at the software layer, honestly,” he says. One of the reasons for Nvidia’s success has been CUDA, the chip giant’s programming software, which allows engineers to coax better performance from the silicon and optimize functionality. “Nvidia spent a lot of time making sure that their CUDA layer works well and that the software is easy to use. And that's a lot of what we've invested in over the last year and a half — to get Trainium there.” (Amazon would not specify how much it invested in software improvements, but pointed to making integrations with popular developer frameworks like Pytorch, as well as committing $110 million to a research program called Build With Trainium to push usage at universities.) Still, despite those challenges, Anthropic, OpenAI and plenty of others are Trainium customers. Amazon, meanwhile, has poured around $8 billion into Anthropic, valued at $380 billion, and Garman says the AI giant helped to improve Trainium’s software through its usage of the chips. In February, Amazon said it would also invest $50 billion into OpenAI and that the company would consume 2 gigawatts of compute on Trainium. Garman, who was heavily involved in all aspects of that deal, hopes OpenAI will similarly improve Trainium. “When you've got Anthropic you learn a certain set of things. When you're going to have OpenAI models, you'll learn a different set of things,” he says. “The more different applications that we get running on our chips, I think the better our next generation of chips will be.”MORE FROM FORBESForbesAbu Dhabi’s Hidden Stake In One Of Venture Capital’s Biggest PlayersBy Iain MartinForbesThe OpenAI Graveyard: All The Deals And Products That Haven’t HappenedBy Phoebe LiuForbesThe ‘AI Gods’ Spending As Much As They Can On AI TokensBy Richard Nieva