Andy Jassy has made it known that he believes AWS can be a trillion-dollar revenue business. During Amazon’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday, he repeated this ambition.
“What we’re building at Amazon is unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. There has never been a business with a trillion dollars of annual revenue,” he said.
However, before the cloud business gets there, Amazon is going to have ramp up its capital expenditures to build out the infrastructure necessary to support that blossoming business.
“We still expect 2026 cash capex of approximately $220 billion — the majority for AWS — and expect to spend meaningfully more in 2027, with a clear line of sight to attract its financial returns,” Jassy revealed on Thursday.
Amazon’s big spending on its AI infrastructure buildout has been an ongoing source of concern for investors this year. Indeed, during Thursday’s call, Wall Street analysts repeatedly asked Jassy to explain the spending, the signals that the growth really will come, and the profit margins expected.
Jassy told them it was all money well spent because the e-commerce giant planned to capitalize on a historic moment in global cloud demand driven by AI. AWS revenue increased 39 percent from the year-ago quarter, a trend of steady growth for the sixth straight quarter.
And the CEO forecast on the call that it would increase by 40% not just next year, but in 2028, too.
“AWS is a $184 billion annualized revenue run-rate business, and yet the opportunity remains extraordinary,” the CEO enthused. “With our continued pace of innovation, new core and AI functionality, enterprises wanting to run their core and AI workloads in AWS, and the amount of capacity that we’re adding each year, we believe that AWS can grow north of 40 percent in each 2027 and in 2028, and be a trillion-dollar revenue business in the next five to 10 years.”
Jassy added that the company was “in the very early days” of AI adoption by the enterprise and said that, so far, the “strategy is working.”
Later, when questioned why the investment needed to grow AWS was so substantial, Jassy characterized the AI boom as a “once in a lifetime opportunity” that required, and was worth, such a big financial commitment now.
“We’re going to invest to continue being the leader,” he said. “We can fund this plan, and I think it will forever change the size of Amazon. It will forever change our revenue.”
Investors, however, remained concerned. Shares were down about 6% on Thursday in after-market trading.
The AI boom has been a mixed blessing for the cloud industry, since the AI services that undergird the boom are supported by cloud infrastructure. Like Amazon, other cloud providers are spending big but also earning big. Microsoft, for instance, just posted yet more record-breaking revenue growth, driven largely by its cloud business. It, too, has spent a bundle.
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Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing [email protected].
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