Jassy’s shareholder scorecard

Andy Jassy used Amazon’s April 9 shareholder letter to tell investors one blunt thing: the company is about to spend at a scale that makes even last year’s spending look small. He said Amazon plans to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, with most of it aimed at artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure. (aboutamazon.com) That number lands after Amazon already ramped spending hard in 2025. Jassy said free cash flow fell from $38 billion to $11 billion because purchases of property and equipment rose by $50.7 billion, primarily for artificial intelligence infrastructure. (aboutamazon.com) He paired that spending warning with a revenue claim meant to show the buildout is not speculative. In the letter, Jassy said Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud division, now has an artificial intelligence business running at more than a $15 billion annual revenue rate. (aboutamazon.com) Amazon Web Services is the part of Amazon that rents computing power the way a utility sells electricity. Jassy’s pitch is that artificial intelligence will work the same way cloud computing did: lower costs over time, pull in more customers, and still expand total infrastructure spending. (cnbc.com) A big piece of that plan is Amazon’s own chips. Jassy said Amazon’s internal chip business is now generating more than $20 billion a year, and he added that two large customers asked to buy all available Graviton chip capacity for 2026, which Amazon declined. (geekwire.com) Graviton is Amazon’s general-purpose server chip, and Trainium is its chip for training artificial intelligence models. Jassy argued that owning more of that silicon stack lets Amazon cut costs and avoid depending entirely on outside suppliers for the most expensive part of the artificial intelligence boom. (cnbc.com) He also used the letter to remind shareholders that Amazon is building more than data centers. Amazon Leo, the satellite internet business formerly called Project Kuiper, says it began full-scale deployment in April 2025, has booked more than 80 launches, and is building a network of more than 3,000 low Earth orbit satellites. (aboutamazon.com) By late March, Amazon Leo said it planned to double its annual launch rate, and the company’s public materials say the service is preparing for an initial rollout in 2026. That turns the satellite project from a distant science project into another business that needs factories, launches, antennas, and ground infrastructure right now. (aboutamazon.com) The other spending bucket is automation inside Amazon’s core retail machine. Jassy’s letter highlighted robotics alongside chips and satellites, which fits Amazon’s long-running push to move more packages through warehouses with fewer wasted steps and faster handoffs between people and machines. (aboutamazon.com) The thread running through all of it is timing. Jassy wrote that much of the 2026 spending should be monetized in 2027 and 2028, which is Amazon telling investors to accept weaker near-term cash generation in exchange for the chance at bigger operating income later. (msn.com) Amazon has made this argument before, but the scale is different now. In the same letter, Jassy pointed to 2025 revenue growth from $638 billion to $717 billion while asking shareholders to tolerate a business that is becoming more capital-intensive again, not less. (geekwire.com) So the scorecard in this letter is not just “Amazon likes artificial intelligence.” It is Amazon putting public numbers on the table for cloud revenue, chip demand, satellite deployment, and a roughly $200 billion 2026 spending plan, then asking the market to judge the payoff a year or two later. (aboutamazon.com)