Mark Zuckerberg Slams Amazon, Jeff Bezos Over High AWS Pricing

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday slammed the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon Web services (AWS) for its soaring costs in cloud computing and data storage.

Zuckerberg’s remarks came during his speech at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropic organization that organized a seminar on the challenges in scientific research.

During the live-streamed discussion, Zuckerberg said one of the new challenges with cutting-edge research and start-ups is the high cost of computing services.

The Facebook CEO noted that even while the cost of sequencing human DNA and its data generation has come down, their storage has become highly expensive as a barrier to analyzing all the information.

Zuckerberg also mentioned Amazon Web Services and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos while referring to the high costs in data storage infrastructure.

“One of the things we talk about is our cost of computing and our AWS bill,” Zuckerberg said.

“Let’s call up Jeff and talk about this”, he quipped while interacting chat with the research center’s co-presidents, Dr. Joseph DeRisi and Dr. Stephen Quake.

AWS as Amazon’s growth driver

AWS has emerged as a major contributor to profits to the parent company and clocked $8.4 billion in revenue in the latest quarter.

Amazon’s big events like Amazon Prime are also made technically savvy and economically viable by AWS.

Among other players, Google Cloud said in July that it will make $8 billion a year. Microsoft has not disclosed its sales for the Microsoft Azure cloud, but going by the market shares it is deemed No 2 and is trying to catch up with AWS.

Noting that scientific research used to have cost burden coming from things like staffing up the wet lab, manufacturing drugs, and clinical trial research, Zuckerberg said computing is the latest high-cost area.

All the top cloud providers including AWS and Google, are leveraging the big opportunity to sell into the biotech sector where genomics projects are growing.

The size of the human genome is more than 6 billion letters. It is such a massive data that scientists find it hard to decipher in driving new treatments.

Meanwhile, health IT company Cerner announced it would leverage its partnership with AWS to launch a cloud-based health platform and incorporate artificial intelligence to expand usability and insights for patient care.

Named Project Apollo the platform will pursue a more cognitive approach in practicing medicine, per Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer.

Cerner launched a collaboration with AWS in July for accelerating healthcare innovation and has hailed AWS as its most preferred cloud provider.

Meanwhile, a new study has revealed that cloud computing in healthcare is increasing and will cross $80 billion by 2025. The study was named “Global Cloud Computing in Healthcare Market Size Forecast 2019 to 2025.”