This is clearly just cherry picking. They did NLP + Echo + Alexa in house. Cloud / servicification on their own.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-...
>Amazon to acquire Yap, move into speech recognition?
https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-y...
>Amazon has reportedly acquired Evi for voice-guided search
https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-...
I think Annapurna was more strategic than you think.
* James Hamilton in 2010: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-network...
* Annapurna acquired in 2015.
* In 2017 they reveal that every EC2 server has a Nitro (Annapurna) chip for networking: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...
Chips are peculiar because they matter a lot in a customer facing way but they are not a 100% transparent feature. I think AWS customers couldn’t care less what their instances are powered by as long as they are 1) Fast 2) Cheap 3) Secure. But the chip happens to influence those things heavily, so they become almost like referential values to aggregate those characteristics in a way that’s easy to market.