Jeff Bezos said Amazon’s custom chip business “will be our next pillar”, alongside the retail, distribution and cloud divisions of the world’s largest company by profit, as the group prepares to spend about $200 billion by 2026, most of it on intelligence infrastructure.
Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, told Fortune that the chip division, which includes Trainium and Graviton processors, will be “the cornerstone” of that investment.
“A few of our offerings have been permanent pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and Amazon Web Services. What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is planning to be our next pillar,” Bezos said.
The $200 billion is part of a broader spending among technology groups “hyperscaler” that is expected to exceed $700 billion this year. Those statistics have given rise to concerns about an industry bubble.
Tech companies are developing their own processors to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s AI chips. Amazon’s new chip, Trainium4, is expected to be launched next year.
Bezos has been talking about Amazon’s race to catch up with AI rivals, as he was described by an influential Wall Street analyst last year as being “in last place in AI”.
He said the company’s success in Marketing, media through Prime Video and cloud computing through Amazon Web Services, which had a revenue of 129 billion by 2025, was down to being “customer oriented”.
“Most companies will tell you they love their customers, but they’re obsessed with competition,” Bezos said. “You can’t be very customer-focused unless you like to innovate … You have to innovate. And Amazon is traditionally good at both of those things.”
“If we ever stop thinking about customers, if we ever stop innovating, if we start doing short-term trade,” he said, “we may coast for a while, but we will lose.”
Andy Jassy, who previously ran AWS, took over from Bezos as CEO in 2021. Fortune quoted Jassy as saying that AI will change “every customer experience we know today and create a whole new world”.
“I think we live in a world where … the key to a computer is usually chips,” Jassy said. “The growth of AI is very important, but we have a chip business that we’ve built over the last decade that is growing very quickly.”
Jassy said in April that AWS’s AI spending rate exceeded $15 billion, protecting the level of investment. “We’re not investing … on a hunch. Of the AWS capex we expect to spend in 2026, most of which will be monetized in 2027-2028, we already have customer commitments for a large portion of it,” he said.
It was revealed at the same time that the custom chips business has annual revenue of more than $20 billion, double the $10 billion reported in the fourth quarter results.
Jassy suggested that Amazon could eventually sell its chips to foreign customers. Google struck a deal last October to supply Anthropic, the creator of Claude, with one million of its custom AI chips, worth tens of billions of dollars.
Bezos’ comments came amid a cautious mood in global markets for AI chip stocks, amid concerns about corporate spending on the technology and low-cost Chinese competition. South Korea’s tech-heavy Kospi index fell more than 10 percent on Tuesday and Japan’s Nikkei fell 4 percent.
Amazon, along with Meta, Apple and Microsoft, should report earnings later this week. Shares of Nvidia fell 5 percent overnight after the Wall Street Journal reported that the chip maker is in talks to provide about $250 billion in financial guarantees to OpenAI as part of a data center project. Some investors say deals like that mean Nvidia is guaranteeing debt that pays for itself instead of driving sales through organic demand.
Bezos, 62, also described Amazon’s growth from the start of an online bookstore in 1995. “You couldn’t at that time have predicted the magnitude of the changes that would occur, and anyone who predicted the magnitude of the changes would probably have been immediately institutionalized and sent to a mental hospital,” he said. “It would be unbelievable or unbelievable.”
He also talked about Prometheus, his AI startup reportedly worth more than $40 billion, which is said to be creating AI tools to help developers create products faster.
“If you step back, all the wealth of civilization is driven by innovation,” Bezos said, adding: “We have a lot of things to invent.”
