Jassy Says AWS Capacity Is Sold Out for 2026

Amazon Web Services has no big blocks of computing capacity left to sell for 2026, and little for 2027, according to Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, even though the company expects to spend about $220bn on capital projects this year.

“Even spending $220 billion this year, we’re leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table,” Jassy said at the start of an episode of the a16z Show, the podcast of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, released on 23 October. “We always leave a certain amount for on-demand, but 26 is obviously sold out. 27 is largely sold out. A good chunk of 28 is sold out.”

In brief

What he said: AWS capacity for 2026 is sold out, 2027 is largely sold out and “a good chunk” of 2028 is taken.
The spending: Amazon expects about $220bn of capital expenditure in 2026.
What’s next: Amazon reports third-quarter results on 29 October.

Jassy says Amazon could spend more and still not catch up

The comments came in a conversation with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg. Reuters reported that Jassy said Amazon “could invest a lot more and it wouldn’t be a bad use of capital”, given that capacity for 2026 is already sold. The Information also reported the remarks, under the headline that AWS is largely sold out of capacity into 2028.

Reuters quoted him in more detail on what is left: “2027 is largely sold out. We always leave a certain amount for on demand and our inference service bedrock, or EC2, but largely sold out all the big chunks. A good chunk of 2028 is sold out.” EC2 is AWS’s service for renting cloud servers; Bedrock gives customers access to AI models to build their own applications.

Jassy put the scale of the business in numbers. According to a transcript of the episode, he said AWS grew 36.7% year on year last quarter, on an annual revenue run rate of $169bn, and that it is now almost three times the size it was in 2021, when he became chief executive. The episode’s show notes say he believes AWS could eventually become a $1tn annual run-rate business.

The spending plan has already grown this year

In February, Jassy said Amazon expected to spend “about $200 billion” in 2026, a figure TSN set beside the plans of other big buyers in its post-GTC look at AI infrastructure spending. Reuters and the podcast’s show notes now put the plan at about $220bn.

That money goes into data centres, servers, chips and power. Amazon has been backing its own Trainium chips with new software, and has been exploring small nuclear reactors in Indiana with X-energy and the utility AEP to supply the grid and data centres.

“Our job is to try to figure out how to have as much capacity as we can,” Jassy said on the podcast.

Outside forecasts point both ways. SemiAnalysis has forecast about 50GW of new data-centre capacity in 2027, citing leases already signed, while Gartner has warned that more than $3.5tn of AI infrastructure spending could face write-downs by 2030.

A sold-out cloud is the strongest answer yet to the AI bubble question

Investors have repeatedly asked whether the biggest technology companies are building more AI capacity than anyone will pay for. Jassy’s answer is that the problem runs the other way: Amazon cannot build quickly enough to meet the orders already placed. If 2026 is sold and most of 2027 is spoken for, the spending is backed by customers who have committed, not by forecasts.

That fits the SemiAnalysis view that signed leases, not speculation, are driving the next wave of building. It also explains why Jassy talks about spending more rather than less: when the shelves are empty, the risk he sees is turning customers away.

There are limits to what a podcast can show. “Sold out” was not defined in megawatts, chips or dollars, and Amazon has published no figures for how much capacity is committed or to whom. A long order book also concentrates risk: if a few large AI customers slow down, the commitments matter only as much as the contracts behind them. Gartner’s write-down warning is the other side of the same bet.

Amazon’s results on 29 October will test the claim

Amazon is due to report its third-quarter results on 29 October, Reuters said. That will be the first chance to see whether the order book Jassy described shows up in AWS’s growth rate and in any change to the $220bn spending plan.