Amazon CEO Jassy says AWS can hit $1 trillion revenue within a decade

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy used the company's quarterly earnings call on Thursday to argue that AWS can grow into a trillion-dollar revenue business within the next five to ten years, according to TechCrunch. The catch is that reaching that milestone requires Amazon to keep pouring historically large amounts of capital into AI infrastructure and data centers before the payoff arrives.

A trillion-dollar target for AWS

AWS currently operates at a $184 billion annualized revenue run rate, Jassy said on the call, with revenue up 39 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier — a streak TechCrunch described as the sixth straight quarter of steady growth. Looking forward, the CEO projected growth above 40 percent in both 2027 and 2028.

Jassy framed the ambition in historical terms, telling investors that "there has never been a business with a trillion dollars of annual revenue." He also argued that enterprise adoption of AI remains in its earliest stages, and that the company's strategy so far is working — positioning AWS to capture demand as it matures.

The spending behind the forecast

Growth at that scale does not come cheap. According to TechCrunch, Jassy said Amazon expects approximately $220 billion in cash capital expenditures in 2026, with the majority going to AWS, and plans to spend meaningfully more in 2027. He told analysts the company has a clear line of sight to attractive returns on that investment.

The outlay has been a persistent worry for investors this year, and analysts on Thursday's call repeatedly pressed Jassy to explain the spending, the evidence that the growth will actually materialize, and the profit margins Amazon expects. His answer, in essence, was that the AI boom is a "once in a lifetime opportunity" that justifies front-loading investment now, and that Amazon will keep spending to remain the market leader. He added that the company can fund the plan and that it will permanently change Amazon's size and revenue, TechCrunch reported.

Wall Street is not fully convinced

The growth numbers did not settle the debate. Amazon shares fell roughly 6 percent in after-market trading following the call, according to TechCrunch — a signal that investors still want more concrete evidence that heavy AI spending will convert into proportionate profits.

Not just an Amazon story

The tension is not unique to Amazon. As TechCrunch noted, the AI boom has been a double-edged development for the cloud industry: the services powering the boom run on cloud infrastructure, which lifts revenue even as building that infrastructure lifts costs. Microsoft, for instance, just posted another round of record-breaking revenue growth driven largely by its cloud business, after committing similarly large sums to its own expansion.

Why it matters

Jassy's projection is more than a CEO talking point. If AWS becomes a trillion-dollar revenue business, it would be larger than the overwhelming majority of companies in existence, and its capacity decisions would effectively shape the supply — and pricing — of enterprise computing and AI services for years. The roughly $220 billion capex figure for 2026 alone underscores how much of the AI boom now rests on physical infrastructure: chips, data centers and power. For the broader industry, Thursday's call crystallized the central question of this investment cycle: whether AI workload demand will grow quickly enough to justify spending at a scale no company has ever attempted. The after-hours share decline suggests the market has not yet made up its mind.