According to Reuters, Amazon is in preliminary discussions to invest in cloud services provider Rackspace. If there's a deal to be struck, Reuters' source said it could take one to two months to negotiate.
San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace provides hybrid cloud-based services that enable businesses to run their workloads in a public or private cloud.
Rackspace already has a symbiotic relationship with Amazon as it helps smaller companies move their data to Amazon Web Services' cloud. A spokesperson for Amazon said the company doesn't comment on speculation.
While large enterprises have the in-house IT professionals to enable new services and features on AWS, Rackspace is helping businesses that don't have that expertise accelerate their cloud adoptions. In addition to AWS, Rackspace also moves customers' cloud-based data and applications to Microsoft Azure, VMware and Google Cloud.
Rackspace was bought by Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion in 2016, and was listed on the stock market earlier this month. Rackspace raised $703 million in gross proceeds from its IPO, but saw its stock decline by as much as 22% on its first day of trading.
Rackspace's shares increased by as much as 17% on Monday on the news of AWS' potential interest
RELATED: Rackspace expands professional Service Blocks portfolio to keep pace with AWS
In December, Rackspace announced it had expanded its Service Blocks portfolio to help business keep pace with Amazon Web Services' innovations. Service Block Patterns streamline customers’ adoption of AWS by consolidating expertise across infrastructure, applications, data, strategy and integration.
Last year, Rackspace announced Kevin Jones as its third CEO in two years.