Amazon CEO Calls for ‘Aggressive’ AI Spending to Fuel Future Growth

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has made a bold appeal to companies to invest “aggressively” in artificial intelligence (AI), stating that doing so now is essential to unlock long-term financial gains. In his annual letter to shareholders, Jassy emphasized that “substantial capital” is required to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape and to meet the rising demand for AI-driven products and services.

“We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know,” Jassy wrote. “The demand is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and our customers, shareholders, and business will be well-served by our investing aggressively now.”

Amazon itself plans to spend more than $100 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, with the “vast majority” of that earmarked for enhancing AWS’s AI capabilities. Jassy pointed out that the major current costs in AI revolve around building data centers and acquiring high-performance chips, noting that “AI chips are much more expensive than CPU chips.” However, he added that this infrastructure will become more cost-effective over time.

He highlighted Amazon’s Trainium2 chips as an example of evolving price-performance improvements, which deliver “30%-40% better price-performance than the current GPU-powered computing instances.” Additionally, Jassy expressed urgency in making an inference, applying trained AI models, less expensive for customers, aided by advancements in “model distillation, prompt caching, computing infrastructure, and model architectures.”

“If your mission is to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, and you believe every customer experience will be reinvented by AI, you’re going to invest deeply and broadly in AI,” he asserted.

Currently, Amazon is developing over 1,000 generative AI applications, and the company’s AI revenue is growing at “triple-digit” year-over-year rates, amounting to a “multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate.” Amazon has also invested around $8 billion into AI startup Anthropic and integrated its Claude software into the new AI-powered Alexa+.

In comparison to other tech giants, Amazon’s commitment aligns with broader industry trends. For example, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently defended similar massive investments, calling AI “as big as it gets.”

Despite economic uncertainties and market fluctuations, including concerns over tariffs, Jassy reassured stakeholders that demand remains strong. “We have such high demand right now for AWS and AI. The growth is so significant that we don’t see any attenuation in demand, and we’re going to keep building,” he told CNBC.