Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the Infrastructure the AI Era Needs
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy talks with a16z about Amazon's roughly $220 billion AI infrastructure build-out, its custom chips, why data center fears are overblown, and how AI will reshape teams, security and products.
The gist
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Jassy says Amazon's roughly $220 billion of 2026 capex still leaves demand unmet; 2026 capacity is sold out and 2027 largely sold out.
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Jassy says Graviton and Trainium give about 30 to 40% better price performance, key since inference is still an order of magnitude too expensive.
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Pushing back on data center critics, Jassy says golf courses use 200 times more water than all of Amazon's data centers.
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Citing six engineers rebuilding Bedrock's inference engine in 76 days, Jassy predicts smaller teams and agent-ready code that can patch security threats in minutes.
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Jassy tells young people to use AI heavily and try building things, but says critical reasoning and human judgment will still matter most.
Also mentioned
4:50
Amazon Prime Video
· "How the team has progressed our Prime Video business, which is now a large and profitable business."
4:57
Zoox
· "The low earth orbit satellite we're building with Amazon Leo, or autonomous driving ride-hailing service..."
6:05
Amazon Leadership Principles
· "We have this set of leadership principles that a lot of people know about. We have the 16 leadership..."
21:53
ChatGPT
· "On one end of the barbell are the AI labs who are consuming gobs and gobs of compute unlike anything I've..."
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