What Forrester Found
In its Q4 2025 Wave evaluation of 13 AI infrastructure providers, Forrester Research positioned AWS as a Leader, awarding it the highest score in the Strategy category. AWS also received the maximum score of 5.00 across 16 specific criteria spanning both current offerings and strategy, including architecture, data management, training, security, scalability, vision, innovation, roadmap, and pricing flexibility and transparency.
Forrester's evaluation framework centered on three requirements for successful AI infrastructure: workload-specific architecture suited to training, fine-tuning, and inference; engineering efficiency across compute, network, storage, and orchestration; and sustainability with flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in.
AWS's Approach: Proprietary Chips Plus NVIDIA GPUs
A central element of AWS's positioning is its dual-track hardware strategy. The company offers its own custom silicon—AWS Inferentia for inference and AWS Trainium for training—alongside NVIDIA GPU instances. According to Forrester's report, this gives customers cost-efficient options for inference workloads without hardware lock-in, while NVIDIA GPU access remains available for high-end performance needs.
Forrester characterized AWS as best suited for companies running high-volume or elastic inference workloads that prioritize cost efficiency but still require GPU access for peak scenarios. The report also noted AWS's close partnerships with leading model developers, which it said gives customers direct access to a diverse set of foundation models.
Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock are cited as part of the broader AWS AI services ecosystem connected to this infrastructure.
Why This Matters
AI infrastructure is increasingly a strategic decision, not just a technical one. As organizations move from AI experimentation toward production-scale deployment, choices around compute, orchestration, and vendor flexibility have long-term cost and capability implications.
One practical takeaway for teams evaluating cloud AI infrastructure is that analyst evaluations like the Forrester Wave can surface how providers differ on dimensions such as pricing transparency and roadmap commitment—factors that may not be obvious from product documentation alone.
It is worth noting that Forrester explicitly states it does not endorse any company or advise selecting products based on Wave ratings, and that opinions reflect judgment at the time of publication. The report is attributed to December 16, 2025. Organizations should treat analyst rankings as one input among several rather than a definitive selection guide.
Read the official announcement (opens in a new tab)