Q1 earnings: CEO Andy Jassy on why customers are choosing AWS for AI

AWS AI revenue hit $15 billion run rate in Q1 2026, growing 260x faster than AWS's early years. Amazon expanded OpenAI partnership, adding GPT-5.4 to Bedrock and launching new agent-building tools.
AI-powered customer service and inventory management tools will become table stakes for competitive sellers. Agencies should start testing AWS Bedrock agents now to build AI capabilities before clients demand them.
The rapid AI infrastructure growth indicates sellers and agencies will face increasing pressure to automate operations or risk being outcompeted by AI-powered competitors.
Explore AWS Bedrock's new agent tools to automate customer support, inventory forecasting, or listing optimization before competitors gain first-mover advantage.
Audit current AI spending and tools - consolidating on AWS ecosystem may reduce costs as they bundle more AI services with existing infrastructure.
Bottom Line
AWS AI boom signals automation wave hitting ecommerce operations.
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Official Platform Update
Direct platform communication. Highest-value for policy, product, and operational changes.
Impact Level
medium
AWS AI boom signals automation wave hitting ecommerce operations.
Key Stat / Trigger
$15 billion AI revenue run rate
Focus on the operational implication, not just the headline.
Full Coverage
On Amazon’s most recent quarterly earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared why customers are choosing AWS for AI: We’ve never seen a technology grow as rapidly as AI, Amazon is already a leader, and companies continue to choose AWS for AI. To put our growth in perspective: Three years after AWS launched, it had a $58 million revenue run rate.
In the first three years of this AI wave, AWS’s AI revenue run rate is over $15 billion—nearly 260 times larger. Amazon and Anthropic expand strategic collaboration Anthropic to secure up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of current and future generations of Amazon’s Trainium chips to train and power their advanced AI models.
There are several reasons customers are choosing AWS for AI. First, we’ve built broader capabilities than others. That includes model-building with SageMaker, which reduces training time by up to 40%.
High-performance inference with the leading selection of frontier models on Bedrock, which saw 170% growth in customer spend quarter-over-quarter, and processed more tokens in Q1 than all prior years combined. We’re excited to make OpenAI’s models available in Bedrock. Yesterday, we added OpenAI’s GPT-5. 4 model, with 5. 5 coming soon.
Yesterday, we also started the preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, Powered by OpenAI, a Stateful Runtime Environment that enables any organization to build generative AI applications and agents at production scale. We believe that modern agentic applications will be stateful, and this new technology will rapidly accelerate agentic AI adoption.
OpenAI has said they’re already seeing unprecedented demand for this new product, and we’re seeing heavy customer interest as well.
Most of the value companies derive from AI will be through agents, and AWS customers can build agents with their proprietary data in Strands, which has been downloaded more than 25 million times and saw 3x more downloads quarter-over-quarter.
Customers can deploy agents with enterprise, scale, security and reliability with AgentCore, which is being used to deploy an agent as frequently as every 10 seconds. We also offer turnkey agents for coding, software migrations, business operations, and knowledge workers in Kiro, Transform, Connect, and Quick, and they continue to resonate with customers.
Andy Jassy weighs in on the rapid growth of Amazon’s chips business Amazon’s chips business saw nearly 40% quarter-over-quarter growth in Q1, and it has momentum. The number of developers using Kiro more than doubled quarter-over-quarter, and enterprise customer usage increased nearly 10x. Customers have used Transform to save over 1.
56 million hours of manual effort when migrating and modernizing their workloads. The number of new customers using Quick has grown more than 4x quarter-over-quarter, and we just announced v1 of our Quick desktop app yesterday.
It’s very compelling as it can query your email, calendar, slack, local files, and several other applications you use every day to flag important communications, retrieve and summarize information, make recommendations, compose and send communications to others, and create agents that highlight or automatically do work that you used to have to do yourself.
You can easily keep refining your preferences and Quick’s advanced knowledge graph enables its AI agents to automatically learn from your interactions to become more personalized over time. One of our enterprise customers just told us: “Quick isn't just improving how we work. It's letting us reimagine it."
Second, and another reason customers continue choosing AWS is that, as they expand their use of AI, they want their inference to reside near their other applications and data, and much more of it resides in AWS than anyplace else.
Third, as customers expand their AI usage, they also want to consume additional non-AI services, and they’re choosing AWS because we’ve built the broadest and most capable core offerings by a wide margin.
We offer thousands of features across compute, storage, databases, analytics, security and more, and Gartner consistently recognizes AWS’s leadership across their major cloud evaluation areas.
Fourth, AWS has the strongest security and operational performance of any AI and infrastructure provider, and startups, enterprises and governments continue to choose AWS as the foundation for their most critical workloads. For more, read Amazon’s first quarter results.
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Original Source
This briefing is based on reporting from About Amazon. Use the original post for full primary-source context.
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