Amazon’s chief executive has given the clearest demand statement yet from a hyperscaler this earnings season. Andy Jassy said in a video podcast with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg that Amazon Web Services capacity for 2026 is already sold out, that 2027 is largely sold out, and that a good chunk of 2028 is sold out, Reuters reported. Amazon reserves some capacity for on demand use and for its Bedrock inference service and EC2, he said, but all the big chunks are committed.
Jassy framed the constraint as construction, not demand. Amazon is struggling to keep pace with demand from AI labs and enterprises, he said, and the company could invest a lot more than its planned roughly $220 billion of 2026 capital expenditure without it being a bad use of capital. That is a direct answer, ahead of results, to the sceptical case made by Apollo’s chief economist in yesterday’s edition, that AI spending has produced no payoff outside big tech itself: the seller of the capacity says the capacity is spoken for into 2028.
The test comes on Thursday. Amazon reports third quarter results on October 29, and the figures that will be judged against Jassy’s claim are AWS revenue growth, the backlog or remaining performance obligations the company discloses, and any revision to the capex plan. A sold out book supports the spending only if the buyers keep paying at current prices, which is what the print, and Microsoft’s and Alphabet’s prints the day before, will show.
Datacenter Dynamics carried the same remarks on October 26 as the claim circulated through the data center trade press, where it reads as a capacity planning signal as much as an investor one: if the largest cloud provider’s large blocks are committed through 2027, enterprise buyers who have not contracted face longer waits or smaller providers.