Big AWS customers, including Stripe and Toyota, are hounding the cloud giant for access to DeepSeek AI models

AWS CEO Matt Garman.

Big Amazon cloud customers have been pressing the tech giant to give them access to DeepSeek’s AI models, the latest sign of the Chinese startup taking the tech world by storm.

More than 20 key clients of Amazon Web Services asked the company to make DeepSeek models available through Amazon’s Bedrock AI development tool this weekend, according to an internal document obtained by B-17.

Toyota, Stripe, Cisco, Yelp, and Workday were among AWS customers asking for this access, with many wanting to test and evaluate DeepSeek’s AI capabilities internally. Other companies that made similar requests include Mercado Libre and WK Kellogg, the document showed.

An Amazon spokesperson told B-17 that Bedrock customers use multiple models to meet their unique needs, and the company remains focused on “providing our customers with choice.”

“We are always listening to customers to bring the latest emerging and popular models to AWS,” the spokesperson said.

Spokespeople for Stripe, Cisco, Yelp, Workday, Toyota, Mercado Libre, and WK Kellogg didn’t respond to requests for comment.

DeepSeek recently rolled out AI models that are on par with, or better than, some of Silicon Valley’s top offerings — at a fraction of the cost. Its cheap pricing, strong performance, and compute efficiency have raised questions about US tech companies’ massive spending on competing products.

Tech stocks, including Nvidia, Broadcom, and TSMC, plunged on Monday as investors tried to assess the long-term implications of DeepSeek’s initial success.

Amazon shares dropped early on Monday trading but rallied during the day to end up 0.2%.

The moves highlight Amazon’s strategic advantage in the generative-AI race. From early on, AWS focused on providing customers with as many AI models as possible through Bedrock, believing that no one model would dominate the market.

That’s a contrast to other tech companies, such as OpenAI and Google, which have spent heavily on building their own frontier AI models.

AWS still has an internal AGI team developing its own AI models, and the company unveiled the latest version, Nova, in December. But Amazon has mostly prioritized offering a range of other AI models through the cloud.

Amazon often makes decisions based on customer feedback, and the company is most likely considering making DeepSeek’s models available through Bedrock after such a flood of client requests, a person familiar with the matter said.

One AWS employee told B-17 that the company wasn’t in “panic” mode over DeepSeek like some other tech companies. If DeepSeek’s models are good, “we’ll just host it on Bedrock,” the person said. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters.

“We expect to see many more models like this — both large and small, proprietary and open-source — excel at different tasks,” the Amazon spokesperson said while noting that customers can access some DeepSeek-related products on AWS through tools such as Bedrock.