AWS CEO on building a $1 trillion business
Amazon thinks its cloud business could generate $1 trillion a year within the next five to ten years. I sit down with AWS CEO @mattsgarman in Seattle to understand what gives him that confidence and what could get in the way.
Garman explains how AI is pushing companies to move their core operations into the cloud, accelerating the business AWS spent two decades building. We discuss why he thinks inference, the computing required to run AI models, is still below 1 percent of its eventual scale. He says AWS is adding one GPU every 14 seconds and expects capacity shortages for another couple of years. I ask how he decides who gets the GPUs, why he holds capacity back for startups that don’t exist yet, and where he sees risk in the industry’s spending.
Recorded right after the midterm elections, our conversation also covers the backlash against data centers, what the industry needs to do to win over communities, and why he sees deserts as more promising than space.
I also ask about the reset inside Amazon’s Nova team and whether it still intends to compete at the frontier of AI. We get into selling Trainium chips outside AWS, the rise of inference providers like Baseten and Fireworks, and Amazon’s big research bet on using mathematical proofs to help AI agents follow rules.
Timestamps:
00:00 AWS’s trillion-dollar bet
02:24 How AI is accelerating cloud growth
09:33 The cost of scaling AI
14:10 The risks of the compute boom
17:02 Why inference is still early
20:03 The backlash against data centers
28:21 Data centers in space, oceans and deserts
31:38 The rise of AI inference providers
33:53 AWS’s full-stack strategy
36:52 Why AWS is selling Trainium chips
38:11 How AWS allocates scarce compute
40:10 AWS’s frontier AI ambitions
41:37 Making AI agents safe
46:31 Open vs. closed AI models
49:14 Running AWS inside Amazon
Links:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4uEHhddFRexDy3dYiCMNYc?si=6oDh50TITACVfyZj3MawYw
YouTube: https://youtu.be/1C_MErgk2Z0
Substack: https://sources.news/p/aws-ceo-matt-garman-1-trillion
Apple Podcasts: https://sources.news/p/aws-ceo-matt-garman-1-trillion
Thanks to the show’s sponsors: @mercury, @meetgranola , and @Atlassian