ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Amazon thinks its cloud business could generate $1 trillion a year within the next five to ten years. I sit down with AWS CEO Matt Garman in Seattle to understand what gives him that confidence and what could get in the way.
Garman explains how AI is pushing companies to move their core operations into the cloud, accelerating the business AWS spent two decades building.
We discuss why he thinks inference, the computing required to run AI models, is still below 1 percent of its eventual scale. He says AWS is adding one GPU every 14 seconds and expects capacity shortages for another couple of years. I ask how he decides who gets the GPUs, why he holds capacity back for startups that don’t exist yet, and where he sees risk in the industry’s spending.
Recorded right after the midterm elections, our conversation also covers the backlash against data centers, what the industry needs to do to win over communities, and why he sees deserts as more promising than space.
I also ask about the reset inside Amazon’s Nova team and whether it still intends to compete at the frontier of AI. We get into selling Trainium chips outside AWS, the rise of inference providers like Baseten and Fireworks, and Amazon’s big research bet on using mathematical proofs to help AI agents follow rules.
Thanks to the show’s sponsors: Mercury, Granola, and Atlassian.
