Amazon is quietly writing one of the most important business playbooks of our time, a cascading virtuoso of what I have called the One Oasis Strategy and its extension, the Double Play (click here to read how I explained both in Harvard Business Review).

At the center of Amazon’s rise was a simple oasis: ecommerce. That marketplace of books first, then everything became the gravitational center of the company. But Amazon did not stop at selling products, it built systems to make that oasis work at scale. In doing so, it created internal capabilities of compute, storage, and logistics that were not originally designed as products, but as enablers.

Then came the first great leap: Amazon turned its internal infrastructure into Amazon Web Services (AWS). What began as a support system for ecommerce became a global cloud computing platform. That is the essence of the Double Play: build an internal capability to win your primary market, then externalize that capability as a standalone business. AWS did not just support ecommerce; it became Amazon’s profit engine.

Now, Amazon is executing a second-order Double Play; a Double Play on top of a Double Play. To optimize AWS, Amazon designed its own chips – custom silicon like Graviton and Trainium – to reduce dependency on third-party suppliers and improve performance-per-dollar. Again, the chips were not the business; they were tools to strengthen the oasis (now AWS, not ecommerce). But history is repeating itself.

As Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has noted, demand for these chips is so strong that Amazon is considering selling them externally. What started as an internal optimization layer for AWS could become a massive standalone semiconductor business, potentially a $50 billion enterprise if operated independently. This is where Amazon’s strategy becomes symphonic.

First layer: ecommerce as the oasis.
Second layer: AWS as the Double Play from ecommerce.
Third layer: custom chips as the Double Play from AWS.

Each layer is born to serve the previous one. Each layer, once mature, becomes a market-facing business. This is not diversification; it is cascading innovation, a stack of capabilities where every internal necessity becomes an external opportunity.

In physics terms, Amazon is conserving and compounding business momentum by continuously creating new growth vectors from internal systems, enabling multiplies in size and growth velocity.

Lesson: Do not chase many businesses. Build one powerful oasis. Then engineer capabilities to serve it. And when those capabilities mature, externalize them. That is how to engineer a new basis of competition and become a category-king company in your industry.

Comment: “Your “Double Play” framework (applied to Amazon) is elegant but somewhat revisionist, and appears to reverse-engineer intentionality from outcome. ”

My Response: Not revisionist – you missed the core of my thesis, which is this: the Oasis is the best product or unit of a business. As long as you keep investing to make that oasis better, in a winner-takes-all world, you gain superior leverage to compound your positioning. That One Oasis becomes the anchor of dominance.

And as it strengthens, it creates the pathway for the Double Play, a concept I borrowed from baseball where you further monetize the capabilities built around that focused investment.

The products you referenced, like Fire, were not designed to enhance ecommerce. They were orthogonal bets; Amazon exploring its own mobile device strategy. They were not extensions of the Oasis.

But if you think about an oasis in a desert, the analogy becomes clearer. Communities thrive around a well-nurtured oasis because it sustains life. In the same way, when a company identifies and deepens its One Oasis, every surrounding capability begins to draw strength from it.

My use of the term One Oasis is deliberate. It is a call for discipline for companies to focus on building the best product, not just making scattered investments. Beyond the Harvard piece, I have expanded this framework extensively in the Tekedia Mini-MBA, where the full depth of the concept is explored. You can watch this video

Shares of CoreWeave rose more than 13%, extending an already strong run for the stock as investors welcomed another major customer win just a day after the company unveiled a $21 billion expansion of its cloud partnership with Meta Platforms.

The agreement with Anthropic, whose financial terms were not disclosed, will bring fresh compute capacity online later this year to support production-scale workloads for Claude, one of the fastest-growing frontier AI model families in the market. According to the companies, the partnership will begin with a phased infrastructure rollout, with scope for future expansion as demand accelerates.

The deal is believed to be more than another cloud-services contract. It is seen as a strategic supply agreement in an industry where access to compute has become as critical as access to capital.

The race among leading AI developers is no longer being fought solely at the model layer. Increasingly, it is a contest over who can secure sufficient GPU capacity, data-center power, and networking bandwidth to train and deploy increasingly larger systems.

That is precisely where CoreWeave has carved out its niche. The company, often described as a “neocloud”, specializes in renting out high-performance AI infrastructure built primarily around Nvidia’s advanced GPU architecture.

Unlike traditional hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, CoreWeave’s business is singularly focused on GPU-intensive AI workloads.

With Anthropic joining its customer roster, CoreWeave said nine of the ten leading AI model providers now use its platform, a striking validation of its infrastructure strategy.

The agreement reflects Anthropic’s aggressive push to lock in long-term compute access amid intensifying competition with OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The startup has been moving quickly to diversify its sources of infrastructure.

Earlier this week, Anthropic signed a long-term capacity arrangement involving Broadcom and Google, securing access to roughly 3.5 gigawatts of AI compute capacity beginning in 2027. Reuters also reported that the company is exploring the possibility of designing its own chips, a move that would mirror the broader industry trend toward vertical integration in AI hardware.

Together, these developments underscore a key reality of the AI boom: compute scarcity remains one of the industry’s most consequential bottlenecks. Practically, frontier labs are beginning to treat compute contracts much like airlines hedge jet fuel or manufacturers secure long-term semiconductor supply.

Any disruption in access to GPUs can slow training cycles, delay product rollouts, and erode competitive advantage.

One of the market’s longstanding concerns has been customer concentration, making the Anthropic deal a major financial win for CoreWeave. Last year, Microsoft accounted for roughly 67% of the company’s revenue, leaving investors concerned about overdependence on a single client.

This new agreement materially improves that picture. CoreWeave now has a diversified roster of blue-chip AI clients, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, which reduces concentration risk and strengthens revenue visibility.

That diversification matters because CoreWeave’s business is extremely capital-intensive. The company is pouring billions into data-center buildouts, GPU procurement, cooling systems, and power infrastructure.

Recent disclosures show it has been aggressively raising capital to keep pace with demand, including debt offerings and a major $8.5 billion loan facility to fund expansion. This has led some investors to question whether growth is being bought at the expense of balance-sheet strength.

Friday’s rally suggests the market is increasingly willing to look past those concerns, provided the company continues to convert capacity investments into long-duration contracts.

In the space of months, CoreWeave has secured an $11.9 billion agreement with OpenAI, a $21 billion expansion with Meta, and now a multi-year arrangement with Anthropic. That sequence effectively positions CoreWeave as one of the principal infrastructure beneficiaries of the AI supercycle.

The deal also comes with a broader industry implication. The fact that model developers are increasingly outsourcing vast chunks of compute capacity to specialized providers suggests that the AI economy is evolving into a layered ecosystem.

At the top sit the model builders. Beneath them are the compute suppliers, chipmakers, and data-center operators. In this hierarchy, CoreWeave is emerging as one of the most important infrastructure intermediaries, effectively the backbone provider for the model wars.

That makes Friday’s move in the stock more than a reaction to a single contract. Analysts see it as a market verdict on CoreWeave’s emergence as a strategic utility for the AI age. If demand for Claude and other frontier models continues to accelerate, this deal may prove to be another major step in cementing CoreWeave’s role as one of the industry’s most indispensable suppliers.