In CapEx Manifesto, Amazon CEO Defends Billions in AI Investments 

An indie rock band from New Zealand, Thomas Edison and the New York Rangers each had a cameo in Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s latest letter to shareholders. In a sprawling manifesto published Thursday, Jassy shared his early aspirations to be a sportscaster, deployed a medley of golf terms and took a few swipes at competitors. He also doubled down on the company’s massive AI spending. 

AI is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger,” Jassy wrote. Translation: What bubble? Of course, he has to say that. In early February, Amazon said it expected to spend $200 billion in 2026 as it pumps money into AI innovation. Investors hated the idea, and the stock price still hasn’t fully recovered. 

“We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” Jassy’s now promising them. 

The Old One-Two  

The Amazon leader took a page out of the Regina George playbook (ahem, burn book) as he went after Nvidia, doling out back-handed compliments. “We have a strong partnership with NVIDIA, will always have customers who choose to run NVIDIA, and we will continue to make AWS the best place to run NVIDIA,” Jassy wrote, simultaneously signaling that the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance may be just around the corner. “Customers want better price performance,” he said, and Amazon’s Trainium chip can deliver. 

Jassy’s 5,000-word manifesto had plenty of shade left over for the rest of the Valley: 

• The CEO also namedropped Intel. “In the CPU space, virtually all of the workloads ran on Intel chips until we invented Graviton in 2018,” he wrote. Graviton, Amazon’s CPU chip, “is now used expansively by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) customers.” Rubbing salt in the wound, Jassy added that two large AWS customers have asked if they could buy all Amazon’s Graviton instance capacity this year. (The answer was no: “We can’t agree to these requests given other customers’ needs, but it gives you an idea of the demand,” Jassy said.) 
• Jassy didn’t directly take aim at Elon Musk or his companies, but he did say that Amazon Leo, the company’s low Earth orbit satellite network, is scheduled to launch in mid-2026. Leo’s main competitor is SpaceX’s Starlink, which typically offers users download speeds of 45 to 280 Mbps and upload speeds of 10 to 30 Mbps. Amazon previously promised download speeds up to 1 Gbps and upload speeds up to 400 Mbps. 

Staying Strong: Sticks and stones aren’t hurting Intel. The semiconductor’s stock has soared nearly 50% since the end of March amid news it would join Musk’s Terafab AI chip project and buy back Apollo Global Management’s stake in its Ireland chip plant. On Thursday, stockholders got another win with the announcement that Intel is expanding a chip partnership with Google.