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a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Amazon's CEO on AWS capacity versus AI demand, from the episode's cold open. Amazon expects about $220 billion in capex this year.
Even spending $220 billion this year, we're leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table. We always leave a certain amount for on-demand, but 26 is obviously sold out. 27 is largely sold out. A good chunk of 28 is sold out. The financial markets are saying, oh, there's not enough money in the world to finance these things. Everything we do in the world today, stock market, banking, healthcare, they're all using data centers. Our job is to try to figure out how to have as much capacity as we can. We have an opportunity to help across so many more customer experiences and make their lives better and easier every day. The big laps being willing to pay almost anything for power cooling chips. Well, maybe we should buy out the old guys and sell them to the new guys because they'll pay us whatever.
Amazon expects to spend roughly $220 billion in CapEx this year. And according to CEO Andy Jassy, even that isn't enough to meet AI demand. In this episode, Ben Horowitz and I sit down with Andy to unpack that build out, why he believes AWS could eventually become a $1 trillion annual run rate…
Thanks for having me.
So you're five years into running Amazon, and you've done a lot as CEO right now, $220 billion in CapEx spend, AWS, 28%. There's a lot that you've achieved. How do you think about the ambition in 2026 as it relates to Amazon relative to 2021 when you took over formerly as CEO?