Jassy says AWS can be a trillion dollar business

The person asking you to pay for AI compute now has a ten-year plan to be ten times bigger. Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, said AWS can grow into a trillion dollar business. He told the company's Q3 earnings call this week. Amazon will spend about 220 billion dollars on capital expenditure this year. Most of it goes to AWS. TechCrunch reporter Lucas Ropek covered the call.

Jassy said AWS has already crossed a large size. "AWS is a 184 billion dollar annualized revenue run-rate business, and yet the opportunity remains extraordinary," he said. He added that AWS can grow more than 40 percent in both 2027 and 2028. Jassy said AWS can reach one trillion dollars in annual revenue. He put the time frame at "the next five to 10 years." Then he said it in his own words. "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."

The number behind the claim

TechCrunch reports that AWS revenue grew 39 percent year on year in the quarter. The 220 billion dollar capex figure covers Amazon as a whole. The majority goes to AWS. Jassy said 2027 spending will be "meaningfully more" than 2026. He tied the spend to AI workloads. He called the current moment a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." He said enterprises are "in the very early days" of AI adoption.

What the number does not say

Jassy did not say what share of AWS revenue today is AI related. He did not break out AI run-rate on its own. The five to ten year timeline is Jassy's own. He did not name a middle milestone. He did not say what growth rate holds after 2028. A trillion dollars in five years would need roughly 40 percent compound growth from here. Ten years would need about 18 percent. The two paths carry very different capex curves.

The 184 billion dollar figure is a run-rate, not a reported annual total. It is the quarterly figure projected over a year. That reads higher than the trailing twelve months.

The claim rests on continued AI demand. Jassy's position is that enterprise AI spending is early. Other reads of the same market are less sure. US tech stocks fell sharply earlier this week over AI infrastructure spending fears, which TechCrunch and the BBC both reported.

A team buying AI capacity should read the plan as a commitment to spend. It is not a promise about price. AWS has said it is sold out through 2028 for some capacity, as The Information reported. The vendor plans to spend 220 billion dollars this year to meet demand it calls early. That vendor expects buyers to pay for the build-out. Multi-year reserved contracts and committed-use discounts move with a plan this size, not list price.

Source

Lucas Ropek, TechCrunch.