CEO Andy Jassy’s 2025 Letter to Shareholders

Dear Shareholders: When I graduated from college, I wanted to be a sportscaster. After sending my resume reel to many small markets around the U. S. , and only getting two nibbles, I settled on doing sports production at a major network. To make extra money, I also coached my former high school soccer team, and worked at a retail golf store.

Six months later, a college classmate convinced me to interview at the consumer products company where he worked, and I spent three years as a Product Manager there. I left that job to try some of my own businesses.

After deciding these businesses weren’t my calling, I tried short stints in sales and investment banking, before going back to graduate school and ending up at Amazon three days after my last final exam in May 1997. Not exactly a straight line. AWS followed lots of squiggly lines, too.

The original vision included storage, compute, payments, and human intelligence. Some of those (e. g. storage and compute) became lynchpins in AWS. Others didn’t succeed. We didn’t initially plan a database service; and when we built one, our first attempt failed to get traction.

We went back to the drawing board and built new relational and non-relational database services, which have resonated well and become core to millions of AWS applications. When we launched EC2 (our compute service), it was a single instance type in one availability zone, Linux-only, with no auto-scaling, load balancing, block storage, or private networking.

Over time, we added those capabilities and hundreds more services. AWS was initially attractive to start-ups (companies like DoorDash, Dropbox, Pinterest, Slack, and Stripe were among many that built their businesses on AWS). Pundits said enterprises and governments would never use cloud or AWS for anything substantive.

In 2008, Netflix decided to move all of its applications to AWS, then came big commitments from GE, Intuit, and others—and eventually the CIA chose AWS as their partner to build their classified cloud. Growth came fast and furious, and as it accelerated, so too did our capital expenditures (“capex”) with dilutive impact on free cash flow (“FCF”).

At our 2014 AWS operating plan review, the discussion started with a senior leader at the company musing, “Tell me again why we’re doing this business?” AWS has worked out well for Amazon, but a straight line? Not really. There’s a band I like from New Zealand called “The Beths,” who’ve written several excellent records, with thought-provoking lyrics.

I eagerly await their new releases, and when their latest album dropped last summer titled “Straight Line Was a Lie,” it made me think about how prescient that expression is. Most long-term endeavors do not follow a linear straight line, up and to the right.

Progress jumps around; it’ll zig up, then sometimes stall, or zag down, or force you back to the starting line. Sometimes, it feels like you’re running in circles. But, the path is rarely straight. That’s because the world is complex, and new technology, business model invention, competitors, global issues, or people and cultural shifts can come into play.

We’re in the middle of some of the biggest inflections of our lifetime (e. g. AI, robotics, space industrialization, geopolitical and military conflict). And, just as proficient golfers need to be skilled across driving, approach shots, chipping, and putting, durable companies must be adept at managing different elements of inflections.

I’ll share some of our lessons below and why we’re bullish on what’s ahead for Amazon. Wherever possible, invent the next inflections. We try to anticipate what will make customers’ lives easier and better every day, and invent the next inflection.

Historically, we’ve successfully done so in areas like Retail, Logistics, AWS, Ads, Kindle, Alexa, and Pharmacy. There are too many new efforts in flight to mention them all, but will mention a few. First, despite many improvements over the years, customers always want lower costs and faster delivery speed.

While we continue to work on productivity and inventory levels, robotics provides a step-level change for how we can deliver faster, reduce the cost of carrying more selection, and automate movements that cause strains and injuries to our teammates.

Accelerated by acquiring Kiva in 2012, and investing in numerous robotics initiatives the last 14 years, we now have over one million robots operating in fulfillment centers helping with stowing, picking, sorting, and intra-facility transport. And, we've done this while continuing to be one of the largest job creators in the country.

While the above progress is substantial, we’re still in the early stages of how we’ll leverage robotics. Expect us to keep innovating on form factors, use case diversity, agility, grasping, and intelligence.

And, wherever we can leverage our scale and real-time feedback loop from so many robots in our fulfillment network to build robotics solutions for other industrial and consumer