The growth case
AWS revenue rose 39% from the same quarter a year earlier, its sixth consecutive quarter of strong growth. Jassy forecast 40% growth next year and again in 2028.
AWS is currently running at an annual revenue rate of $184 billion. Jassy said the company could grow by more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028, and become a trillion-dollar-revenue business within five to ten years.
He pointed to several sources of potential growth:
Jassy said enterprise AI adoption is only beginning and argued that Amazon’s strategy is working. He described the AI boom as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” that requires significant spending now.
The cost of the forecast
The forecast asks investors to accept a long stretch of heavy spending before the promised scale arrives. Amazon has confirmed about $220 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, with most going to AWS, and plans to spend significantly more in 2027. Jassy said the investments are already producing financial returns.
Wall Street analysts repeatedly pressed him on the quarterly earnings call about the size of the spending, evidence of future growth and expected profitability. Jassy said Amazon intends to keep investing to maintain its leadership, and believes the company can fund a plan that will permanently change its scale and revenue.
I think the tension is not whether AWS is growing; 39% growth is hard to dismiss. It is whether investors will keep accepting infrastructure spending on this scale while the payoff is still being described in five-to-ten-year terms. The 6% share-price drop suggests Jassy has not yet made that trade-off feel comfortable.
A cloud-wide bet
The AI boom is lifting demand for cloud infrastructure because the services driving it run on cloud systems. Other cloud providers are also investing heavily while growing revenue. Microsoft recently reported a new record for revenue growth, driven in large part by its cloud division, and also spent heavily.
What remains unclear is how much of AWS’s forecast depends on AI workloads, and how much on companies shifting their core systems to the cloud. That distinction matters: both support demand, but they do not tell investors the same thing about how durable the growth will be. Amazon is asking the market to fund capacity before the full shape of that demand is known.
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