Matt Garman retweeted
AWS CEO on building a $1 trillion business
Amazon thinks its cloud business could generate $1 trillion a year within the next five to ten years. I sit down with AWS CEO @mattsgarman in Seattle to understand what gives him that confidence and what could get in the way.
Garman explains how AI is pushing companies to move their core operations into the cloud, accelerating the business AWS spent two decades building. We discuss why he thinks inference, the computing required to run AI models, is still below 1 percent of its eventual scale. He says AWS is adding one GPU every 14 seconds and expects capacity shortages for another couple of years. I ask how he decides who gets the GPUs, why he holds capacity back for startups that don’t exist yet, and where he sees risk in the industry’s spending.
Recorded right after the midterm elections, our conversation also covers the backlash against data centers, what the industry needs to do to win over communities, and why he sees deserts as more promising than space.
I also ask about the reset inside Amazon’s Nova team and whether it still intends to compete at the frontier of AI. We get into selling Trainium chips outside AWS, the rise of inference providers like Baseten and Fireworks, and Amazon’s big research bet on using mathematical proofs to help AI agents follow rules.
Timestamps:
00:00 AWS’s trillion-dollar bet
02:24 How AI is accelerating cloud growth
09:33 The cost of scaling AI
14:10 The risks of the compute boom
17:02 Why inference is still early
20:03 The backlash against data centers
28:21 Data centers in space, oceans and deserts
31:38 The rise of AI inference providers
33:53 AWS’s full-stack strategy
36:52 Why AWS is selling Trainium chips
38:11 How AWS allocates scarce compute
40:10 AWS’s frontier AI ambitions
41:37 Making AI agents safe
46:31 Open vs. closed AI models
49:14 Running AWS inside Amazon
Links:
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4uE…
YouTube: youtu.be/1C_MErgk2Z0
Substack: sources.news/p/aws-ceo-matt-…
Apple Podcasts: sources.news/p/aws-ceo-matt-…
Thanks to the show’s sponsors: @mercury, @meetgranola , and @Atlassian
AI is expected to grow faster in health care than in any other field, and it matters who gets to build with it. We’re committing $100M of AI and cloud technology over five years to the organizations serving underserved communities: aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws…
Customers want to know they'll have the capacity to grow with AI, and we're investing to make sure they do. We have lots of capacity for our customers. $184B run rate, 39.3% growth, $578B committed backlog, 40%+ growth ahead. Thanks @EdLudlow for having me. youtube.com/watch?v=z4sCWxVy…
Matt Garman retweeted
Five marketing interns get one real business problem, no brief, and five days to solve it with a single tool.
They didn’t expect day one at Amazon HQ to be like this.
AI is genuinely transformative for defenders. AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities scored higher than any other AI agent on CyberGym-E2E, the benchmark that measures the full loop from finding a vulnerability to shipping the fix. Generally available today. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws…
We're open sourcing TorchNeuron. Your existing @PyTorch code runs on Trainium with one config change, and we're contributing upstream to make PyTorch more hardware-agnostic for everyone. aboutamazon.com/news/innovat…
Thank you, Christoph Schweizer and @BCG, for the time, the partnership, and a great conversation about agentic AI on CEO Moments of Truth. bcg.com/executives/ceo-agend…
Matt Garman retweeted
AWS CEO Matt Garman with a16z's Raghu Raghuram on the biggest cloud provider in the world being rebuilt for the agentic era:
$220B in CapEx for 2026, two million NVIDIA GPUs on order, AWS's AI chips sold out through next year, and a new 30-second AWS account with no credit card required so agents can get rolling.
0:55 $170B in revenue, growing 37%
2:40 30-40% of revenue started as startups
4:55 Startups want a cloud for agents
9:10 An AWS account in 30 seconds
12:25 Agents don't need bulletproof databases
16:30 Why AWS won't sell every GPU to the frontier labs
22:00 Why Matt isn't worried about a bubble
24:45 Why AWS builds its own power plants
27:45 Planning for the next supply shortage
30:25 Saving one county $5K per resident
33:10 How AWS built its own chips
40:05 What's holding enterprise agents back
45:35 Why Bedrock never sends your data to the model
49:30 AWS's new AI security tool
51:50 Why AWS teams of 10 are now 3-4
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=rn_afJaP…
@mattsgarman @awscloud @RaghuRaghuram
The best thing we can do for builders is get out of their way.
Starting on @awscloud is now easier than ever. Sign up, build in minutes.
Can't wait to see what you build.
AI needs 2-3x more networking bandwidth. @awscloud has doubled network capacity in three years and will double again by 2027. A lot of the work to make that possible starts in the Network Product Development lab: aboutamazon.com/stories/insi…
America can lead the most important race of our generation, and getting the facts right is a big part of how we do it. Today we're sharing our Amazon Data Center Commitment and launching Built Together, a new investment in the communities where we build.
You can't predict what data an AI agent will need. With DuckDB now inside Aurora PostgreSQL, one endpoint reaches your live operational data and everything in your data lake, with nothing to copy or keep in sync. DuckDB remains open source. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ama…
GPT-6.1 Sol from @OpenAI is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, approaching the performance of OpenAI's flagship model GPT-6 Astra at a fraction of the cost.
Near-Astra intelligence, built for everyday work. GPT-6.1 Sol from @OpenAI is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock.
Build and scale capable agents in production with the performance, security, and reliability of Amazon Bedrock.
The companies getting value from AI aren't the ones saving the most time, they're the ones deciding what to do with that time. Too often it just gets reabsorbed into more of the same work, done faster. The opportunity is to point AI at something new, something customers couldn't get before. That's what our new Reimagine: Turning AI into Value report gets into. Read it here: aws.amazon.com/executive-ins…
The most durable skill in the age of AI isn’t any single technology. It’s learning.
I was back at @Stanford last week celebrating the Stanford-Amazon Research Initiative, bringing our researchers together to work on hard problems across AGI, robotics, healthcare and more.
Excited to see what we learn and solve together.
Put the right tools in the hands of ambitious builders and they'll show you things you didn't expect.
Great seeing that in action at our @awscloud Global Meeting this week.
Thanks to @mza for hosting, @odysseyml's @olivercameron for showing us Agora-2, and @Francessca_V and @steipete, creator of @openclaw and now at @OpenAI, for a great conversation on how AI is changing the way developers build.
Grateful to everyone pushing the work forward.
More here: aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws…
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The biggest unlock I see right now isn't just AI for engineers. It's AI for everyone else, the people who never touch code but spend half their day in email, spreadsheets, and five different systems.
The @amazonquick desktop app is generally available today on macOS and Windows, with a new mobile experience that carries the same context to your phone.
Your agents keep working even after you close your laptop.
Get started here: aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine…
