Why Is $220 Billion of Amazon CapEx Still Not Enough?

Andy Jassy says Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion of CapEx in 2026, and even at that level the company is leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table. He says no equation makes the size of the buildout simple.

In the first three years of the generative AI wave, the AI business in AWS is over a $25 billion run rate. After three years, early AWS was about a $60 million annual run rate business, so the AI business is several hundred times faster. He remembers a leadership breakfast 15 years ago when a telco spending $50 billion of CapEx sounded unbelievable.

In the early 2000s, product teams spent 70 to 80 percent of their time on infrastructure that did not differentiate them and only about 20 percent on the product. Andy Jassy says AWS was conceived so internal teams could move faster. He does not think any of them anticipated how fast it would grow outside the company.