Building the Cloud for an Agentic World | AWS CEO Matt Garman

Agentic workflows tend to perform better on AWS than anywhere else. Compute sandboxes, gateways, agent permissions versus people, a lot of those are things that we have built and are building and thinking actively about.

The top frontier labs gobble up every available GPUs. At the same time-

Yeah

... you want to promote newer companies that are gonna become the enterprises of tomorrow. How are you thinking about balancing?

From the very beginning of when we launched AWS, startups have been the lifeblood of the core of what we do. These are the innovators that are at the edge of technology, understanding what's possible. We're very intentional about keeping capacity available for the startups. We recently announced we're gonna be buying two million NVIDIA GPUs over the next couple of years. We've been-

Your CapEx this year is what, two hundred or something?

Two hundred and twenty billion dollars for '26, and we don't anticipate slowing down anytime soon because the demand is just massive.

With all the debate around AI, extinction risk, and the Hugging Face attack, what are CEOs asking you about all these things?

Amazon plans to spend two hundred and twenty billion dollars in capital this year, and AWS CEO Matt Garman says they don't anticipate slowing down anytime soon. In this episode, a16z's Raghu Raghuram sits down with Matt to unpack what's driving one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history and how AI is changing the cloud itself. They discuss how AWS decides who gets scarce GPU capacity, the shifting bottlenecks from power and chips to memory and construction, and the company's bet on custom silicon like Trainium. They also get into what changes when agents increasingly write code and manage infrastructure. And Matt shares what AWS is seeing inside its own teams, where agents now write code and engineers increasingly manage teams of agents, accelerating how quickly new products can be built.

Welcome to the pod, Matt. What a time we are living in. So I have a lot of topics to talk to you about.

Awesome.

So-

Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's start actually right from the beginning. So you were the first GM for EC2.

Mm-hmm.

And that was two thousand and six, right? And today you guys are, what, one sixty, one seventy billion in revenue?

Yeah, about a hundred and sixty-nine, hundred and seventy billion. Yep.

Yeah, growing thirty-five-

Thirty-seven. Thirty-seven percent. Yeah.

That's thirty-seven percent at one sixty-nine.

Yeah.

Crazy.

There's a ton of op-- It's interesting to think about it from day one when-

Yeah. Yeah

... the first dollar of revenue, but-

Yeah

... yeah. The interesting thing is we're still at the early stages of what the business can be and what the opportunity is for customers. Most workloads, there's a huge amount of workloads still that live on-prem today, and the amount of compute that people are doing every single day is more than it was the day before. And so you see the tailwind from AI, you see the tailwind from migration into the cloud, and the business has grown really fast. It's been a super fun thing to be a part of.

Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, they'll be writing history books about this and