Jassy Doubles Down on the Trillion-Dollar Vision
Andy Jassy has made no secret of his belief that AWS can become a trillion-dollar revenue business, and he reiterated that ambition during Amazon's quarterly earnings call on Thursday.
"What we're building at Amazon is unlike anything that's ever been seen before," he said. "There has never been a business with a trillion dollars of annual revenue."
But before the cloud unit reaches that milestone, Amazon will need to ramp up capital expenditures to build the infrastructure required to support that growth.
Capex Keeps Climbing
"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 said.
Amazon's heavy spending on its AI infrastructure buildout has been an ongoing source of concern for investors this year. During Thursday's call, Wall Street analysts repeatedly pressed Jassy to explain the spending, the signals that the projected growth will materialize, and the profit margins investors can expect.
Growth Metrics and the Road to $1T
Jassy framed the outlay as money well spent, arguing that the e-commerce giant is capitalizing on a historic moment in global cloud demand driven by AI. AWS revenue rose 39% year over year — the sixth consecutive quarter of steady growth — and the CEO forecast that growth would exceed 40% not only next year but in 2028 as well.
"AWS is a $184 billion annualized revenue run-rate business, and yet the opportunity remains extraordinary," Jassy said. "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 of 2027 and 2028, and be a trillion-dollar revenue business in the next five to 10 years."
He added that enterprise AI adoption is still in its "very early days" and that, so far, the "strategy is working."
A 'Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity'
When questioned about why such substantial investment is needed to grow AWS, Jassy characterized the AI boom as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" that justified the large 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 Remain Wary
Despite Jassy's optimism, investors were unconvinced. Amazon shares fell about 6% in after-market trading on Thursday.
The AI boom has been a mixed blessing for the cloud industry: the AI services driving the surge depend on cloud infrastructure, so providers are spending heavily while also earning heavily. Microsoft, for instance, just posted another quarter of record-breaking revenue growth driven largely by its cloud business — and it, too, has spent a bundle.
As of 2026, the industry-wide capex race shows no signs of slowing, with Big Tech capital expenditures now projected to top $1 trillion in 2027. The central question for AWS and its peers is whether the returns will arrive fast enough to justify the scale of the bet.
via TechCrunch AI