AWS will be a $1T business, Jassy says. But first, it will spend big.

On Amazon's quarterly earnings call Thursday, CEO Andy Jassy repeated his ambition that AWS will one day become the first business to reach $1 trillion in annual revenue. "What we're building at Amazon is unlike anything that's ever been seen before. There has never been a business with a trillion dollars of annual revenue," he said. Reaching that milestone, however, requires substantially heavier capital spending first to build out the infrastructure behind it.

The numbers Jassy laid out are large and rising. "We still expect 2026 cash capex of approximately $220 billion — the majority for AWS — and expect to spend meaningfully more in 2027, with a clear line of sight to attract its financial returns," he said. Amazon's AI infrastructure buildout has been a persistent worry for investors through this year, and Thursday's call reflected that: Wall Street analysts repeatedly pressed Jassy to justify the spending, to identify signals that the projected growth will materialize, and to outline expected profit margins.

Jassy's answer was that the outlays position Amazon to capture what he called a "once in a lifetime opportunity" in global cloud demand driven by AI. The performance data he offered supports at least part of the story: AWS revenue rose 39 percent from the year-ago quarter, marking a sixth straight quarter of steady growth. He put AWS at a $184 billion annualized revenue run-rate business while arguing the opportunity ahead of it remains extraordinary.

Looking further out, Jassy forecast growth north of 40 percent in both 2027 and 2028, citing continued innovation, new core and AI functionality, enterprise demand to run core and AI workloads on AWS, and the capacity the company adds annually. He framed the timeline to a trillion dollars at five to 10 years, adding that Amazon is "in the very early days" of enterprise AI adoption and that so far "the strategy is working." He told analysts the company can fund the plan on its own and that the spending "will forever change the size of Amazon. It will forever change our revenue."

What to watch is whether the growth rates hold against the spending curve. The open questions are familiar but sharpened by the scale: do AWS's 39–40 percent growth rates persist as capex climbs past $220 billion and higher in 2027, and when do those investments convert into the margin expansion analysts kept asking about? Jassy's "clear line of sight to attractive financial returns" is a claim investors will test quarter by quarter as the buildout proceeds.