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Amazon CEO takes aim at Nvidia, Intel, Starlink, more in annual shareholder letter

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassyโ€™s annual shareholder letter reads something like a Kendrick Lamar diss track, if the rapper was a corporate-speak talking CEO and not a poetic Pulitzer-prize winning musician.

Meaning, you have to know the history to understand all of the competitors Jassy takes aim at, alongside cute personal stories about his unrealized dream of being a sportscaster and watching hockey games with his dad.

Of course, Jassy doesnโ€™t throw the gauntlet down directly. He takes a more nuanced approach. For instance, in his challenge to Nvidia, he writes, โ€œWe have a strong partnership with NVIDIA, will always have customers who choose to run NVIDIAโ€ and will always support these chips in its cloud.

But he also says: โ€œVirtually all AI thus far has been done on NVIDIA chips, but a new shift has started.โ€ AWS customers, he says, โ€œwant better price-performanceโ€ meaning Amazonโ€™s own home-grown Trainium AI chips.

Jassy says demand is so high for this chip that capacity for the newest one, Trainium3, is nearly sold out. Remarkably, he says that capacity is also nearly sold out for Trainium4, which still 18 months away from being available.

This means that Trainium has hit a $20 billion annual revenue run rate. But if Amazon were a chipmaker that sold its wares to others, it would be at $50 billion ARR, he postulates.

Granted, Nvidia did $215.9 billion in actual revenue last year. Nvidia may not be shaking in its boots, yet. Still, Jassy presents Trainium as a formidable up-and-comer.

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Jassy didnโ€™t spare Intel either. He points out that AWSโ€™s homegrown Graviton CPU, a competitor to the Intel x86 architecture, โ€œis now used expansively by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers,โ€ aka some of the biggest companies in the world. Two companies even asked to โ€œbuy all of our Graviton instance capacity in 2026,โ€ he writes (emphasis his). โ€œWe canโ€™t agree to these requests given other customersโ€™ needs, but it gives you an idea of the demand.โ€

He promised that Amazonโ€™s Starlink competitor, Amazon Leo, scheduled to launch in mid-2026 is already succeeding, too. Itโ€™s won contracts from Delta Airlines, AT&T, Vodafone, Australiaโ€™s National Broadband Network, NASA, among others.

Interestingly, he also said Amazon could be looking at selling robotics one day. It may turn all the data from its 1 million warehouse robots into โ€œrobotics solutionsโ€ for industrial uses and consumers, he wrote. Is there an Amazon humanoid in our future? Weโ€™ll see. He talked up other Amazon businesses, too, like same-day delivery, groceries, and drones.

But mostly, Jassy tried to make the case for the hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expenditures heโ€™s committed. In February, he announced plans to spend $200 billion in 2026 on capex, mostly building out AWS data centers. Thatโ€™s more than any of the other major tech companies, which are also spending big on capex. Jassyโ€™s pitch to shareholders makes sense considering Amazonโ€™s stock plunged to below $200 a share and hasnโ€™t recovered.

โ€œWeโ€™re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,โ€ he wrote, using as an example that his deal with OpenAI included the model maker pledging to spend $100 billion on AWS. Of course, there are those who doubt OpenAI will meet all of its spending promises.

In a nod to that, Jassy insists that beyond OpenAI, โ€œthere are several other customer agreements completed (and unannounced), or deep in process,โ€ lined up to buy the AWS capacity.

Weโ€™ll have to wait and see. Those who cause a bubble are never the ones who see (or admit) to its existence. โ€œIโ€™ve followed the public debate on whether this technology is over-hyped, whether weโ€™re in โ€˜a bubble.โ€™โ€ But he declares in this letter that, for Amazon at least, this isnโ€™t the case.



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