For years, Amazon has asked Wall Street to be patient. The spending is heavy, the timeline is long, and the payoff is coming. Trust the process. Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter, published April 9, reads differently. This time, he is not asking for patience. He is showing receipts.
In the letter, Jassy put hard numbers around Amazon’s AI and chip businesses for the first time, and the market responded by pushing the stock higher. The numbers are large enough that investors who had been waiting for proof now have something concrete to work with. And honestly, after months of “soon” and “next,” it’s hard not to notice when someone finally writes a number down.
The centerpiece is AWS. According to Misryoum newsroom reporting, Jassy’s letter says AWS’s AI revenue run rate is now above $15 billion as of Q1 2026. That’s a major milestone, and it’s also the first time Amazon has disclosed this figure. More importantly for investors, it replaces vague promises about future AI potential with a measurable pace. For context, AWS’s total annualized revenue run rate stands at approximately $142 billion—so AI services already represent roughly 10% of the entire AWS business. Jassy described demand as “ascending rapidly,” and the company’s capacity buildout seems to be racing to keep up.
There’s a tension here though. Demand is outpacing supply. Misryoum editorial desk noted that AWS added 3.9 gigawatts of new power capacity in 2025 and expects to double its total power capacity by the end of 2027. Even so, some customers are still unable to get the compute they want. It’s the kind of bottleneck that sounds abstract until you’ve lived through it—like standing in line and realizing the store is open, but your particular item isn’t on the shelf yet.
Jassy also made the chip story feel less like strategy and more like momentum. He disclosed that Amazon’s chip business, including Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro, now has an annual revenue run rate above $20 billion, growing at triple-digit rates year-over-year. Misryoum newsroom reporting says that figure doubled from Q4 2025. “Our chips business is on fire,” Jassy wrote, adding that it “changes the economics for AWS, and will be much larger than most think.”
The details behind that confidence are blunt. Trainium2 has largely sold out. Trainium3, which started shipping in early 2026, is nearly fully subscribed. Trainium4—still about 18 months from broad availability—has already been significantly reserved. Misryoum analysis also points to two large customers asking to buy all of Amazon’s available Graviton chip capacity for 2026, and to the fact that Graviton is now used by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers. And then there’s Jassy’s argument about scale: if Amazon sold its chips externally the way Nvidia does, the business would be running at roughly $50 billion in annual revenue.
All of this feeds into the bigger question investors keep circling: why is Amazon planning to spend approximately $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, mostly tied to AI, chips, and infrastructure? Jassy said, “We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” and Misryoum newsroom reporting says his case rests on customer commitments. Jassy indicated existing commitments cover “a substantial portion” of the capex spend and that Amazon expects to monetize most of it in 2027 and 2028. That includes a deal with OpenAI worth more than $100 billion, according to Misryoum reporting. “We’re not going to be conservative in how we play this,” Jassy wrote. “AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger.”
For stock investors, the raw numbers matter—but the sentiment shift may matter more. Misryoum editorial desk noted that analysts at Jefferies said the letter made them more constructive on Amazon, reiterating a buy rating and $300 price target. They also pointed to Trainium and Graviton becoming a “structural advantage” for AWS. That kind of update can change how people frame the next few quarters, even if it doesn’t instantly show up on an income statement. Amazon may still be mid-spend cycle. But Jassy’s letter basically tries to close the gap between “investment” and “proof,” and then… well, it’s hard to ignore when the proof already has a run rate attached—still rising, still moving forward, even if you’re not sure how fast every piece will convert.