Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been with the company since 1997 and came into his current role five years ago. On his first visit to India as chief executive, JC announced to further increase its investment and expand the instant commerce business to 300 cities. He also took out time for an interview with TOI. Part:How have things changed in India for you since you took charge five years ago? What is the further strategy?What’s been happening in India in the last five years is very exciting for us as a country and then as a company investing in India. We have invested more than $40 billion in India since 2010 and we will invest an additional $48 billion by 2030, including the $13 billion we are announcing now. We are making huge investments in India because we see our marketplace business growing very rapidly. One of the things we’re excited about is the growth of instant commerce here, which has doubled every quarter. Prime members who use Instant Commerce are shopping three times more often than before they started using it. We’re also very encouraged by what we’re seeing in our AWS (Amazon Web Services) business. We have two regions, Mumbai and Hyderabad, and hundreds of thousands of customers across India. AI is growing very rapidly, which is one of the reasons we have announced incremental investments. We are increasing the amount of infrastructure and AI capabilities in India because it is growing very fast.
Huge amount of investment is increasing in AWS, cloud and AI business: Amazon CEO Jassy
Can you help us understand how this $48 billion will be allocated across business sectors?If you look at the combination of growth of $40 billion from 2010 and $48 billion by 2030, the largest absolute amount is still in our markets business. But, increasingly we are investing huge amounts in AWS, cloud and AI businesses. Most of the $13 billion increase is for our AI and cloud investments. This will take our total investment in Cloud and AI in India to $21 billion by 2030.You are a late entrant into accelerated commerce. Have you missed the pulse of the consumer and will quick growth cost too much cash?If you look at our marketplace business, we have an unusual offering. We have focused heavily on having the widest selection of items that can reach people in the shortest possible time. We also have a membership program in Prime. If you look at the set of benefits, it’s a very different offering. We started experimenting with different forms of instant commerce a few years ago. But a year ago, we found a format that customers really liked. We’ve expanded it very rapidly and just announced that we’re expanding instant commerce to over 300 cities in India.There is a question of AI’s impact on jobs, especially in a country like India. How do you see this, as well as how it impacts productivity?AI is the most transformative technology of our lifetime, which is saying a lot, considering we live through the internet, mobile, and cloud. Every customer experience we know will be transformed by AI. Almost all of our jobs will change in some way and this cannot help but improve the productivity of almost every job in almost every country. What happens when you have these big transformative technology changes is that people spend their time processing the changes. We also get new jobs that we never imagined before. Fifteen to 20 years ago there was no such thing as a cloud architect and now you have thousands of cloud architects. Although the nature of people’s work will change, there will be plenty of jobs available to people in the long run.In your letter to shareholders, you talked about exploring plans to sell the chips to third parties. what is the status? Also, given the government push towards semiconductors, does Amazon see a role in that sector in India?For almost 12 years, we have been designing our own chips. We did this because our customers are always demanding better value and performance. Several years ago, we began designing our own custom silicon for AI, which we call Trainium, and its price performance is about 30% better than comparable AI accelerators. It is now a $20 billion-plus annual revenue run-rate business. Most of the way we make money from our chips is by selling them as part of our compute offerings. If we sold all the chips to Amazon or third parties, it would be a $50 billion annual revenue run-rate business. The world’s largest AI labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to our chips. We hope that a lot of customers in India will consume those chips.There are reports about your discomfort with the Amazon or Anthropic model and your discussions with authorities in the US. Are they true?We’re at a stage in AI right now where models are improving so rapidly and becoming so powerful that it’s natural that you might have some starts and stops at different stages. Model builders, infrastructure providers, cloud providers and companies all want great models that allow them to transform the customer experience and do so in a secure and cost-effective way. Along the way, there are going to be different times when you have to adjust what the guidelines are and how you work with these models. But I am very optimistic about its progress.
