In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon’s CEO is already painting AI as a success for the company. He claims that AWS annualized revenues from AI just hit an annual run rate of $15 billion in a year in which the company is spending $200 billion on AI-related expenses. To be clear, this means that AWS AI revenues have exceeded one quarter of $15 billion one time, and during its best-ever quarter to date.
But let’s present that as a positive.
“Amazon is smack in the middle of this [AI] land rush, and companies are choosing AWS for AI,” Mr. Jassy writes. “Three years after AWS launched commercially [in 2002, 24 years ago], it had a $58 million revenue run rate. Three years into this AI wave, AWS’s AI revenue run rate is over $15 billion in Q1 2026 (nearly 260 times larger than AWS at that same point) and ascending rapidly.”
To be fair, Amazon is one of a handful of companies that might benefit financially from AI, given the popularity of its AWS…