Andy Jassy: AWS capacity is sold out for 2026, largely sold out for 2027 and 'a good chunk' of 2028

What happened? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the a16z Show, released on 23 October 2026, that Amazon Web ServicesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has no spare capacity for years to come. "'26 is obviously at this point sold out. '27 is largely sold out," he told Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg. AWS always holds back some capacity for on-demand use in EC2 and its Bedrock inference service, he said, but "all the big chunks" are gone, and "a good chunk of '28 is sold out".

The numbers: Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion on capex in 2026, roughly $600 million a day, and Jassy said it is still "leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table". He said AWS's AI business passed a $25 billion annual run rate within the first three years of the generative AI wave, against about $60 million for AWS itself three years after launch. He added that Amazon "could invest a lot more and it wouldn't be a bad use of capital".

The bottlenecks: "There's only so much data center and power today. There's only so much memory, and I don't think that that shortage ends in 2027," Jassy said, describing the trade-off between allocating memory to HBM for AI accelerators and to ordinary DRAM for AWS's non-AI business. Asked whether AWS would shift capacity from long-standing customers to AI labs willing to pay almost anything, he said: "We're not going to squeeze our customers."

Context: A week earlier, Horowitz had said in another clip that Jassy told him Amazon's AI compute was sold out "beyond 2028", arguing that this supply shortage makes the AI build-out different from the dot-com bubble. Amazon has not disclosed the contracted capacity or backlog behind the remarks; it reports third-quarter results on 29 October.

Sources: a16z Show on YouTube · Reuters · Fireside Alpha on X

Image credit: a16z