
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sits down with CNBC’s Becky Quick at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for a wide-ranging conversation spanning the state of the consumer and the impact of President Trump’s tariffs. The Amazon CEO weighs in on artificial intelligence, including its power demand, its impact on hiring inside the company, and Amazon’s push into custom silicon with its Trainium chips. In this episode: Andy Jassy, @ajassy Becky Quick, @BeckyQuick Cameron Costa, @CameronCostaNY
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Cameron Costa
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Andy Jassy
We did a lot of pre buying in the early part of 2025 to enable us to try and keep prices as low as possible for customers. And a lot of our third party sellers did a lot of forward staging in our fulfillment network for the same reasons and that supply has run out in the fall. You start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices.
Cameron Costa
Some of the items Amazon CEO Andy Jassy an extended interview on tariffs and consumers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Andy Jassy
Consumers have been pretty resilient. They continue to spend, they continue to shop. I think that wherever they can they are trying to trade down in price.
Cameron Costa
The power and the infrastructure demands of.
Andy Jassy
AI power has been short in the US around the world there is a power shortage. I think that it is better than it was 18 months ago and still not as plentiful as we all need.
Cameron Costa
Plus how Amazon fits into the entire AI ecosystem with Nvidia semiconductor chips and with chips of its own.
Andy Jassy
If you're building a big inference business like we are and you want to have reasonable margins, if you're not pursuing your own custom AI silicon, you're going to be structurally disadvantaged.
Cameron Costa
I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. Squawkpod reports from Davos. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy begins right now. It is Davos Week. So many of the world's CEOs, politicians and journalists are in a small town in the Swiss Alps crunching through snow for panels, speeches, interviews and yes, a few parties. Most of CNBC's Davos coverage comes in the form of Our interviews on tv on Squawk Box, we bring you conversations with anthropic CEO Dario Amodi, for example, or the heads of banks like bank of America's Brian Moynihan, Morgan Stanley's Ted Pick, even with heads of state like President Donald Trump. But Joe Kernan, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin are busy the rest of the day in Switzerland, sometimes moderating panels and interviews at CNBC's home base in Davos.
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Andy Jassy
Hello, everybody. Welcome to CNBC at Davos. It's so great to see all of you here.
Cameron Costa
That's where this next conversation took place. A longer format morning interview with Becky Quick and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Becky Quick
Thank you to Andy Jassy for joining us this morning and thank you to all of you for being here, too. This is new for me. First time I'm doing one of these interviews like this and I'm really excited to do it with Andy. He covers so much ground. And I know everybody here knows Amazon and everybody here knows Andy Jassy, but I think it's really hard to understand the scope of the company, what it is and what it does without knowing Amazon by the numbers. So let's walk through that just a little bit. Amazon, first of all has a market cap of more than $2.5 trillion. If you take a look at their employees, it's one and a half million employees. They are the second largest private employer on the planet. If you're looking at revenue for the company for the most recent year that was reported 2024, it was $638 billion. And I think if you want to break down just the rate of growth at some of their units that have been pretty spectacular aws, the cloud services unit of the company this year, I think is on an annualized run rate to have revenue of $132 billion. That's up from $108 billion last year. And if you roll back 11 years, it was only $4.8 billion. That just tells you about what Andy has done, just in terms of the unit that he used to run, where things are going and how much growth there is. They run everything from projects like Vulcan, which looks at robotics. They've got AI projects like Sageworks and Bedrock. They have things like Amazon Pharmacy, they Amazon Prime Video. So it's hard to really understand the scope until you start looking through some of those things. Andy, I thought we could start today by talking a little bit about how you spend your time. Not because I Want to know everything you do in your day, but because I think it would show a little bit about what your priorities are for the company. How would you break down a typical day or week?
Andy Jassy
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's great to be here with all you. I would say that it obviously varies day to day and week to week with what's going on. When I started doing my current job in 2021, if you'd asked me whether I would spend a lot of time in the retail business, I would have guessed not that much. And then all of a sudden we had an issue with cost to serve and our fulfillment network in 2022. And I spent a lot of time in 2022 and 2023 on our retail business. But, you know, so it varies depending on what's going on. But I would say roughly there are three big buckets. One is our existing really big business areas like retail and AWS and our ads area. And then I think the second bucket, which is probably the place I spend the most amount of my time is on new businesses. Either businesses that are relatively new or that haven't launched yet. So these are areas like Prime Video or healthcare business, or our low earth orbit satellite that we call Amazon Leo or Zoox. And I would say AI more generally is just we have a big piece of AI in every single one of our businesses and we're building models. So that's, you know, that would be the second bucket kind of new, big new initiatives. And the third would be really around just the company, particularly the culture, you know, and that's another one. I didn't really think I would, you know, when I was thinking about coming into this job, I didn't spend a lot of time wondering would I spend time on the culture. But, you know, when you. For most companies who've had success of any size, especially as you get larger, the culture has historically been one of your secret sauces in your being successful. And that's true for Amazon too. But just as you get bigger, there's a lot of ways the culture gets stretched and it takes work to kind of make sure that you operate the way you want to. We want to operate like the world's largest startup. And, you know, it takes work and it takes energy and the leadership team. And I spend time on that too.
Becky Quick
What does that look like in an example of something to say you spend time on culture? What do you do differently?
Andy Jassy
Well, you know, one of the things that I have a group of people that I spend Time with on a regular basis, just on the culture. We actually call it Culture Club. When we get together, a nod to the old band and we talk about the things that we think are going well in the culture and the things that we think are getting stretched in some way. And we. One of the things we realized over the last couple years as we had grown so quickly and added so many people as we were growing so fast in retail and AWS and ads and a bunch of these new businesses, was that when you add people, you add layers. And when you add layers, it means that historically the group of people that we had always hired really smart, ambitious, customer focused owners who did the work, who owned their destiny on the two way door decisions, which is the majority decisions that our folks make. Then when you add layers, you end up with pre meetings for the pre meetings for the meeting. And you know, people show up at meetings and they don't make recommendations anymore because they know it's going to be two meetings later before you actually make a decision. And we didn't like that. And we weren't moving as fast as we thought we could move. And we want owners to really feel like they own their own destiny. And so we spent a lot of time talking about that as a group and deciding that really one of the biggest issues that we had to address was we needed to flatten some of the layers. And so if you want to move like the world's largest startup, you need to be as lean as you can be in pursuing the surface area that you mentioned earlier that we're pursuing. You need to have as few layers as you can possibly have. And you need the people doing the work to be able to make those decisions quickly and learn from them if they don't work out right and advance them when they do. And so that's an example of something we just decided. We were going to flatten the layers and we were going to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% across the entire company. And to take an initiative like that across our service area, you know, it takes effort, it takes a team being on the same page and then you got to go make it happen.
Becky Quick
Can you talk a little bit about Rohit Prashad leaving AI and the incoming Desantis who's kind of got a larger portfolio that's going over that. What was the meaning behind that move? What's it going to mean?
Andy Jassy
I like you calling them Desantis too, by the way. We're all going to use that a lot. But I have a lot of respect for Rohit. He was at the company over a dozen years. He was an instrumental part of building Alexa and all the natural language understanding and the automatic speech recognition. And I think that he did a lot in helping us not just move quickly to pursuing our own models, our own frontier models, but what he built in the first couple versions of Nova. I think that we have conviction that over time, the very best frontier models are going to have to work very closely with the chip in which they operate on. I think that the best models are going to be really optimized on chips. They're going to have. They're going to run really quickly, they're going to have low latency, they're going to be very, very cost effective. And we wanted to bring together the teams that build our own custom silicon trainium, which is our own custom AI silicon, and the team building our largest frontier models, which is Nova. And Peter Desantis has been at Amazon for, I think he's been there about 27 years. He has done a lot of things. But I've worked with Peter since really the start of aws. Peter had just become a director of the company when we asked him to go run EC2, which is our compute service. But he started working on that about six months before we went to launch. Built that, ran all our compute pieces. He ran all our infrastructure, which for us are our data centers, our network and our hardware. Then he ran all the different AWS services for a while, but one of those was he ran all our chips. And so I really. We felt it was important to bring those together. Peter is incredibly strong technically and has been involved in our model building as well as our chips. And I'm very optimistic about bringing those together. And I think Peter's going to be a great leader for it.
Becky Quick
Let's talk a little bit more about chips, because that's a huge initiative for you. Multibillion dollar business already. And you wrote last summer that, I think it was in your April letter to shareholders that chip prices can and will come down. Do you think that. That Nvidia is charging too much for its chips right now?
Andy Jassy
Well, you know, we learned this lesson before AI, you know, in the CPU business, where we had this very deep partnership with intel, which we still do, but customers always want better price performance. And I would say that a lot of times when you have a significant leader, they have a lot of other features and priorities, and that often isn't the priority for them. And so we, we acquired a team in Israel called Annapurna which is a very talented chip designing team. And we built our own custom CPU that we call Graviton, which has been very successful for customers and for the business. 90% of our top 1,000 customers use Graviton very expansively. It's 40% more price performant than the other leading x86 processors. And we saw this same movie playing out in AI and about five years ago we asked that team to build custom AI silicon. And you know we have a deep relationship with Nvidia. We will for as far as I can foresee. But it is undeniable that customers want better price performance. And if customers are going to be able to roll out AI as expansively as we believe they want to, and they should, the cost of inference has to come down. And so that's why we pursued trainium. Our trainium 2 chip is about 40% more price performant than the other leading GPUs. It's fully subscribed. It's a multi billion dollar business. As you talked about, Anthropic is building their next version of Claude on top of hundreds of thousands of our Trainium 2 chips. We just released our third version of Trainium which is 40% more price performant than Trainium 2, which was already more price performant than other things out there. And I just think that if you want to allow customers to have lower prices for inference, which we do, and if you're building a big inference business like we are and you want to have reasonable margins, if you're not pursuing your own custom AI silicon, you're going to be structurally disadvantaged.
Becky Quick
When you say price performance, that means how much power you get for the amount you're spending.
Andy Jassy
It's when you look at the performance combined with the price, what does that, you know, you can have a higher price on something but be way more performance. You always want to look at the combination of what performance you get for the price.
Becky Quick
Now the deal that you have with OpenAI or this has been reported that you were going to take a 10 billion or larger stake with them. They recently signed with you I think a couple of months ago to take $38 billion in AWS usage that they're going to be using too. We've been watching from the outside, there's so many more deals that are happening. Some of these are called circular deals. It doesn't look like that's what you guys are involved in. But what do you think about the activity that is taking place? The deals that are taking place right now? Is this just a Reflection of the demand that's out there or do you feel like some of these things are circular?
Andy Jassy
It is so unprecedented how much compute is being consumed right now. You just have to only look at how much, you know, how many, how much power is needed, how many data centers are being built. There is. The AI labs are consuming gobs and gobs of computer right now. And so those AI labs believe they have opportunities if they train models very expansively to keep changing the intelligence of these models. So they need a lot of compute, they need money for the compute. And so they're trying to find ways to fund that compute. And I'd say a lot of the companies who provide that compute want to be, you know, want to serve those customers and then have opportunities to also invest in those companies as those companies are looking to find ways to fund what they're doing. And I think those companies are impressive companies. So I think when you look at a company like anthropic company like OpenAI, these are unusual companies who've been building amazing models for 10 plus years and are reshaping the way people use applications. And so I just think it's a function of the time where tons of computer being asked for. They need ways to fund it. Companies have opportunities to invest in companies. Those companies are impressive companies and you're just seeing some of that. But I don't know if that'll continue or not.
Becky Quick
Do you think it ends well?
Andy Jassy
I think it could end well. I mean I'm saying anytime you make substantial investments, if you look at the history of M and A and investments, not all of them are successful and the hit rate is pretty variable. So I think whether the investments end well or not have to see. But I do think the companies that we're talking about just in the last few minutes are impressive companies.
Becky Quick
OpenAI for instance, I think they've signed deals to build out $1.4 trillion in infrastructure just in the last several months. That's pretty ambitious. Think it's realistic based on the demand, you see?
Andy Jassy
Well, it is ambitious. I agree with you and I would say that they are ambitious and, and I think they're ambitious and they're forward thinking and I know that they believe they need quite a bit of compute to train the models the way they believe changes what's possible. And you know, I don't know the details of all those deals. Sometimes when I get a chance to look at them I have a harder time making sense of them all and I just don't know which ones are guaranteed to spend those miles and which are options to spend. But I know that the companies believe they need that much compute.
Becky Quick
Let's talk about data centers, because that's something that you guys are also on the forefront. You just signed a deal with Rio Tinto to lock up more of the copper that they're taking out of the ground. It's not just copper. It's electricity. It's all these things that there's a huge rising demand. Do we have the ability to meet that demand? And what else are you doing to kind of make sure you're getting it?
Andy Jassy
Well, we have not had the power has been short in the US around the world, there is a power shortage. I think that it is better than it was 18 months ago and still not as plentiful as we all need. I mean, I think everyone would tell you, while it's better than 18 months ago, we still could be fulfilling more demand if we had more capacity. And so we have tried every which way we can to work with different communities and different municipalities and different technology providers to enable more power. We've done unique things on the nuclear side. We've invested in some SMR capabilities. We have been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for the last five years. Wherever we have an initiative with water where we give back more water than we take in all the communities in which we operate. And so we're doing everything we possibly can to help try to enable more power. And, you know, we want to do it. We don't expect other people to pay for us. We expect to fund the power that we need. And we create a lot of good jobs in the communities in which we're building a lot of data centers, and we intend to continue to do so.
Becky Quick
When you say you don't expect other people to pay for it, that's been an issue that President Trump has kind of been talking about writ large. He is kind of pushing back on a lot of companies to make sure that consumers aren't paying more for this. What do you guys do on that level?
Andy Jassy
Well, we spend so much money on power, Becky. I mean, we're spending a lot of money in infrastructure. We have always paid our own way. We've always expected to pay our own way. We believe very strongly in the communities in which we operate that we want to leave them better off because we're there than when before we came. And we've created, you know, we've both created a lot of jobs. We're also doing a lot of training of people. We have a number of upskilling programs. We're training hundreds of thousands of people to be electricians, to be data center operators, to work in networking and fiber. And so we're, you know, we're both trying to enable more capacity, but also do so in a way that's good for communities.
Becky Quick
Okay, President Trump is here in Davos this week or is going to be here in Davos. And this may be a Davos like none other, just because of what's happening with tariffs, what's happening with Greenland at this point? Obviously at Amazon, you deal front and center with tariffs all the time. How has it been since April with the tariffs that come in? Have you managed that? And what do you do when it looks like these tariffs are changing on a fairly regular basis?
Andy Jassy
Well, you know, it's interesting to see what consumer behavior has been like a year ago, you know, at this time, we had no idea what to expect. You know, there was all this tumult. And, you know, consumers have been pretty resilient. They continue to spend, they continue to shop. I think that wherever they can, they are trying to trade down in price. They are looking for bargains wherever they can find bargains. I see people a little bit more hesitant on the higher price discretionary items. We have improved our speed of delivery so much that we have so many more people buying everyday essentials from us. It's amazing how fast that business is growing for us. You know, I think that we'll have to see what happens on tariffs. You know, we did a lot of pre buying in the early part of 2025 to enable us to try and keep prices as low as possible for customers. And a lot of our third party sellers did a lot of forward staging in our fulfillment network for the same reasons. And that supply has run out in the fall. You start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items. And you see some sellers are deciding that they're passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices. Some are deciding that they'll absorb it to drive demand and some are doing something in between. And so I think you're starting to see more of that impact. And we have so many items, we have hundreds of millions of items and we have 2 million sellers, many of whom are willing to pursue different strategies and how they price that Amazon's consumers overall I think have fared well. But we'll have to see what happens in 2026.
Becky Quick
What do you do once you run out of those strategies? Like you said, like buying ahead, trying to do some of these things. Are there other levers that you can use to keep prices down?
Andy Jassy
Well, as much as we can. We're trying to work with our distribution partners and our selling partners to try to keep prices as low as possible for consumers. That is our focus. I mean, it has always been our focus, but especially in times of more uncertain economies or when there's changes in trade, our priority is try to figure out to keep price as low as possible at a certain point because retail is a, as you know, retail is a mid single digit operating margin business. If people's costs go up by 10%, there aren't a lot of places to absorb it. And so we're going to do everything we can to work with our selling partners to make prices as low as possible for consumers. But you don't have endless options.
Becky Quick
Let's talk a little bit about the jobs picture because you did make some some news last summer when you talked about how AI is going to be something that you think will eventually lead to fewer jobs at Amazon. That's a little different than the take we heard from Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan who said that if JP Morgan is successful, he thinks they'll have more employees years from now, but they'll be redeployed in different arenas. Have you thought any more about that? Because when you did scale back with some of the employees, you said it was not because of AI.
Andy Jassy
Yeah, it wasn't. It was really, it was what we were talking about earlier. It was really around culture, being able to move quickly and have ownership. I think what I said was I in the next couple few years I could see are having fewer people than we had before. Some of that, a lot of that will be just our continuing to allow ourselves to move quickly as it's important culturally and speed wise. But I do think that jobs are going to be impacted by what's happening with AI over time. They're not in a significant way yet, but I think you'll see that if you just think about how AI and agents will enable you to do coding and customer service and research and analytics, even just the idea of doing spreadsheets the way we've done them in the past, I think those will be pretty different. I don't think that wipes out all those jobs, but I think we'll still have plenty of people in those roles and those people will start their jobs each task they pursue at a higher, more advanced starting point. All the rote work that we used to all have to do before we could get to actually the thinking work. A lot of that will be done by AI. So it's, we'll still have people who will be able to invent quicker and more easily. But I do think that you won't need as many people in all those jobs that we've thrown humans at for the last 20 years. That said, you know, I do believe we're going to have, we're going to have a lot, we're hiring a lot of people now in AI and automation and robotics and you know, our low earth orbit satellite that we're building in health care. So we're going to have a lot of people in other businesses we're pursuing and they're going to be brand new jobs that we haven't thought of. I mean, 15 years ago there weren't jobs like cloud architect. I mean those didn't exist. And whenever you go through any big technology transformation, you find new jobs. I think the same is going to be true here, medium to long term.
Becky Quick
And you also said just over the summer that you already had over 1000 AI projects and agents that were out there and that you were adding more every month. So can you give us an overview, an update of where you are right now, six months later, and what that looks like from the customer's perspective?
Andy Jassy
Yeah, so, you know, I'd say we have over 1000 applications, AI applications we either built or in the process of building. And on the consumer side, you know, if you know what you want to buy, it's harder to find an easier way to do it to go to pop onto Amazon's app or the website and search and buy. But if you don't know what you want, I think that's still one place where the physical dimension has some advantages because you can talk to a salesperson and tell them what you're looking for and they can ask you questions to refine it and they can put different options in front of you and that, you know, I think AI will help quite a bit there. We've built a shopping assistant called Rufus. Rufus has gotten much, much better over the last several months. It's actually quite good.
Becky Quick
I've actually noticed.
Andy Jassy
It's helped me quite a bit actually in some purchases I've been trying to make. And, and so I think that is very helpful. I think if you look at Alexa plus, she's just so much smarter, more capable than her prior version of herself and that's growing very quickly in our advertising area. Just not only the creative that you can build using AI, but having agents that know Everything about your brand, what your presence is like on Amazon. So. So it suggests ways that you can present yourself, knows information about the brand itself. We have an AI agent that does that, that then creates creative for them. It's just, if you look at what we do in Prime Video and Thursday Night Football, with the features we built across all of our consumer experiences, we have quite a few applications that are changing the experience. And then on the AWS side, that business is all about trying to figure out how to enable other companies and developers to build applications themselves. They're using AI like we always use any technology, which is to solve problems. If you want to build an AI app, you need a good model. So in Bedrock, we have the broadest array of capable models. Increasingly, what I think people are realizing when they build models is they want to be training their models earlier than they've been with their own proprietary data companies. Secret Sauce here is their own data. And so just like if you teach a young person a new language early on, they have those skills that helps them learn other languages like it. If you teach the model and train the model earlier with your proprietary data, that foundation allows it to learn according to what matters to you and your business. So we built something called novaforge, which allows you to take early checkpoints in the model and then mix it with data from the model and train it earlier. I think most companies are going to end up using agents as their major implementation of AI. And so we've tried to help people build agents more easily, to be able to deploy them in a secure and scalable way, to be able to use other agents that they don't have to build, whether it's coding or, or transformation or migrations or knowledge workers being able to query anything in their company's data resources or autonomous agents. You know, there's these agents, like coding agents. We have something called curo where you can say to the curo, here's what I want to build, go build the code. We also have built these autonomous agents where you can just point those agents at your source code and your bug list and they'll go solve the bugs. They'll learn about how your code is written. They have your source code in a secure, accessible way, you know, access controlled way, and then can solve a lot of those problems. And, you know, then of course, the inference, cost of inference and building chips. So those are all areas that we're pursuing pretty expansively and we have big investment there and we're making a lot of progress for customers.
Becky Quick
That's great. Finally. Andy, what's your goal this week? What do you want out of Davos?
Andy Jassy
First, stay warm. It's cold outside. You guys have all seen this, but I actually really enjoy this week. It's very busy but I get to meet with a lot of other business folks and a number of government representatives and it's always an amazing opportunity to learn what people care about, what customer experiences they're focused on, what they need from us, and what the issues are. You know, both not just business wise but geopolitically. Davos has always been very good at surfacing those issues and so we always learn a lot as a team. I do as well and it's an action packed week but I always enjoy it.
Becky Quick
Did you learn anything yet?
Andy Jassy
Well, I just got here, I learned it's cold outside, but I'm looking forward to the week.
Becky Quick
Andy, thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate you Foreign.
Cameron Costa
What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity App?
Fidelity App Representative
Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on US stocks and ETFs.
Cameron Costa
That's music to my ears.
Fidelity App Representative
I can only talk.
Fidelity Legal Disclaimer
Investing involved risk, including risk of loss. Zero Account fees apply to retail brokerage accounts only sell order assessment fee not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction based service fee of $100. See full list of Fidelity.com commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC Member NYSE SIPC Bob.
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Cameron Costa
At Capella University, we believe accessible education can make a difference. That's why we offer scholarship opportunities to all eligible students. Un futuro diferente estamma cerca de lo que cres con Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu. Thank you for listening to this special squawk pod reports from Davos so Switzerland at the 2026 World Economic Forum. We have so much more coming to your feed this week. Interviews with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, OpenAI CFO, Sarah Fryer, President Donald Trump, and many, many more. All you have to do is go and follow Squawkpod wherever you're listening now and those episodes will pop up automatically every time we post a new one. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin wherever they may be. Squawk Pod is produced by me, Cameron Costa, Zack Felici, and our Katie Kramer is producing on the ground in Switzerland this entire week. A big thank you to Julie Tras, who's been our editor for the Davos episodes. Have a great day.
Andy Jassy
Hey Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on.
Becky Quick
Stocks in the Fidelity app?
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Andy Jassy
That's right.
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I am always right.
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Episode Date: January 21, 2026
Host/Interviewer: Becky Quick (CNBC)
Main Guest: Andy Jassy (CEO, Amazon)
Recorded At: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland
This episode features an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation between CNBC's Becky Quick and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, recorded during Davos 2026. The discussion covers Amazon's scale and growth, leadership priorities, the company’s approach to culture, the AI and semiconductor arms race, infrastructure and power constraints, tariff impacts, jobs and automation, and Amazon's current AI initiatives. Jassy offers candid insights into Amazon's strategy, its efforts to control costs in supply chain turbulence, and the ways the company is balancing rapid technological progress with organizational agility.
(03:41–05:30)
(07:29–09:39)
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(14:19–17:33)
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On Operating Like a Startup
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup…and it takes work and energy.”
— Andy Jassy (05:30)
On Flattening Organization Structure
“If you want to move like the world’s largest startup, you need to be as lean as you can be…as few layers as you can possibly have.”
— Andy Jassy (09:03)
On AI’s Demand for Power
“Power has been short in the US; around the world, there is a power shortage... while it's better than 18 months ago, we still could be fulfilling more demand if we had more capacity.”
— Andy Jassy (17:55)
On Custom AI Silicon
“If you’re building a big inference business like we are and you want to have reasonable margins, if you’re not pursuing your own custom AI silicon, you’re going to be structurally disadvantaged.”
— Andy Jassy (14:05)
On AI’s Impact on Jobs
“I don’t think [AI] wipes out all those jobs...but I do think you won’t need as many people in all those jobs we’ve thrown humans at for the last 20 years.”
— Andy Jassy (25:17)
On Rufus AI Shopping Assistant
“Rufus has gotten much, much better over the last several months. It’s actually quite good.”
— Andy Jassy (26:48)
| Segment | Time | |-----------------------------------------|----------| | Amazon scale & Jassy’s priorities | 03:41–07:29 | | Company culture & “Culture Club” | 07:29–09:39 | | AI leadership shifts & chip strategy | 09:39–12:08 | | Custom silicon vs. Nvidia | 12:08–14:19 | | Circular deals & AI compute boom | 14:19–17:33 | | Power shortages & infrastructure | 17:33–20:09 | | Tariffs: impact & consumer prices | 20:09–22:39 | | Jobs and AI's workforce impact | 23:23–25:44 | | AI applications (Rufus, agents, Bedrock)| 25:44–29:48 | | Davos goals & final thoughts | 29:48–30:46 |
This episode is an essential listen for anyone interested in the intersection of big tech, AI, geopolitics, and organizational agility at massive scale. Andy Jassy provides rare clarity on how Amazon is building for the future: flattening org structures, betting big on custom chips, racing to keep up with AI’s infrastructure demands, preparing for changing job dynamics, and deploying AI deep into retail and cloud. Quick’s questions are sharp, extracting plenty of unscripted color on headline topics from tariffs to OpenAI’s wild infrastructure bets.
Tone:
Engaged, candid, and analytic, with both interviewer (Becky Quick) and guest (Andy Jassy) focused on substance, scale, and the operational nuances of leading a global megacorporation through unprecedented times.