The most instructive number in AI infrastructure right now isn’t a valuation or a chip benchmark. It’s a calendar. Amazon plans to spend roughly $220 billion on capital projects in 2026 — about $600 million a day, as a16z’s Ben Horowitz put it during a conversation with CEO Andy Jassy — and even at that pace, Jassy says demand outruns supply. “2026 is obviously at this point sold out. 2027 is largely sold out,” he said on the a16z podcast. “A good chunk of 2028 is sold out.”
That single sentence reframes the debate Wall Street is having about Big Tech’s spending. If the question is whether AI demand is real, Amazon’s order book answers it. The harder question is whether the money is being deployed in a way that survives the years-long lag between pouring concrete and booking revenue — and whether the customer relationships Amazon is protecting today pay off before the depreciation bills arrive.
The buildout is financeable because servers are bought late, not early
Jassy’s…
