Andy Jassy, Amazon‘s CEO, has sent the market a signal that is impossible to ignore. During an internal meeting with employees, he revised his predictions for the future of Amazon Web Services, suggesting that, thanks to the generative artificial intelligence revolution, the cloud unit’s annual revenues could reach a ceiling of $600 billion within a decade. That’s double the previous estimate, which was still considered ambitious.
Jassy’s move is an attempt to reassure Wall Street investors, who are watching the company’s mammoth capital spending with growing concern. The plan to spend $200 billion this year mainly on AI infrastructure recently triggered a sharp discounting of shares. Jassy argues, however, that the capital “put on the ground” – in the form of data centres, energy and specialised chips – is the necessary foundation for demand, which is already clear and measurable.
The figures speak for themselves. Coming in at $128.7 billion in sales in 2025, AWS would need to maintain an average growth rate of around 17% per year for the next ten years.
Sustaining such a double-digit growth rate would be an unprecedented achievement. Jassy believes, however, that AI is not just another function of the cloud, but a new paradigm that will fundamentally change the scale of demand for computing capacity.
Amazon is ending the experimentation phase and moving into the brute scale phase. There is a huge short-term risk to this strategy, as can be seen by the stock market’s reaction, but Jassy is putting everything on the line. He says that the current spending is not a ‘hope’ but a reaction to specific signals from the market.
