Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments
48 comments
·February 7, 2025scarface_74
late2part
Were you one of the many overemployed people that also worked at AWS?
scarface_74
I am 50. I have always had a strict policy of never doing two jobs or a “side hustle”. Whatever we can’t do from my working one job, we don’t do.
That means no open source work worrying about my GitHub profile, no BS “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn. Nothing.
When I get off of work, I shut my computer down and live my life - exercising, travel, spending time with friends and family, etc.
Temporary_31337
Imagine if Amazon acted the same way- oh we already have 1 customer, we won’t bother with the next 6 billion because we have one shittty one already.
lesuorac
This seems like a fine decision by Amazon?
If there is a ton of demand for shovels it seems fine to make more shovel factories?
belter
There is a redflag here. Their CapEx is growing faster than revenue. And there is no apparent direct correlation between AWS growth, percentage wise, and CapEx surge...Using CapEx makes profits look higher today...
notyourwork
Agreed, investing in platform facilities and AWS capability seems like it cannot be a terrible idea.
everdrive
This seems like a fine decision by Amazon? If there is a ton of demand for [dog shit tacos] it seems fine to make more [dog shit taco] factories?
decimalenough
Welcome to capitalism. And remember that we're the ones paying for the dog shit tacos that Amazon sells to the companies that then stuff them down our throats, whether we want them or not.
aylmao
Is it us, or is it VCs?
For the foreseeable future at least.
skywhopper
If it’s clear there’s a shovel bubble, though, then it’s a bad idea to over-invest in shovel factories.
lysace
Financially liquid companies locked into feeding AWS (with their 50%-ish profit margin) should buy Nvidia/TSMC/ASML/(AMD) stock to get some of their money back?
Totally not a bubble.
tripplyons
I've heard arguments that you should buy NVDA as a hedge for losing your job to AI. Not sure what to make of it.
url00
If AI actually starts replacing jobs, society is going to collapse/restructure to the point that risk management no longer applies.
throwaway290
It is replacing jobs
morsecodist
Even if the technology of AI ends up driving a huge economic value there is no guarantee that will translate into NVIDIA stock performance. The expectation that NVIDIA will capture a lot of this value is already priced in to the stock, which is a major reason why the current price is so high.
panarky
A better hedge might be private prison corporations and private military contractors.
jazzyjackson
For prisons see GEO (up 100% since the election [0]) and CXW (Up 50% [1])
gov't contractors are in a bit of a bind given the treasury chaos (consider the current agenda to cut waste and inefficiencies)
Looking around for private security I don't see anything publicly traded but I did learn there is an ETF named GUNZ [2] and one might check out the companies they invest in.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GEO/
mrbungie
What I can't wrap my head around is the fact NVDA almost is a representation of "AI infrastructure" in the narrative. It is weird now that everyone is saying the focus is be in inference / test time scaling compute: inference should be easier to offload to chips from other manufacturers.
Maybe I'm too dense to get it, but that doesn't make sense to me.
somanyphotons
I think there is a money to be made in making huge slow inference chips
It needs,
* Does the very best model fit in ram
* Does it eventually produce an answer
I'm completely ok with waiting a few minutes for an inference answer if I can avoid spending $250k for an 8x
DanielHB
Really looking forward what all that GPU compute is going to do for non AI stuff once it quiets down a little.
rbanffy
With that much power, we’ll be able to reliably predict a hundred thousand years into the future of our societies and shorten the period of barbarism after the fall of the galactic empire.
mparnisari
Does this mean that I will be able to use my Echo Dot for something other than asking what the weather is?
rbanffy
My daughter routinely asks hers to tell jokes.
eichi
It's OK. The revenue is from incompetencies of engineers and enterprises that can not switch into siginificantly cheaper cloud vendors.
scarface_74
Where are these significant cheaper cloud vendors?
eichi
Oracle. I like bare-bone ARM VM and bare-bone volumes.
lysace
Going from the embrace of a semi-domesticated mostly aloof wolf to that of an understimulated psychotic tiger.
Uh... Good luck?
teitoklien
… Everywhere ?
OVH, Hetzner, Cloudflare, Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, Equinix (ok Equinix this can be pricey at lower levels)
A million other regional VPS providers, Colocation Hosts, etc ?
dgemm
Most of these are what I'd call "cloud in name only" providers - everyone uses the term but you would have significant challenge moving a cloud workload that makes use of the higher layer abstractions to these.
scarface_74
You really think that all people do with AWS is host a bunch of VMs and they manage all of the services (databases, storage, big data services, messaging apps) themselves?
Drill down in each category
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/...
eichi
Spoil from incompetents is the good strategy and all too much nerd engineers should follow the strategy.
OutOfHere
Amazon requires employees to work five days a week from the office without paying them extra for it. Even if paid extra for it, it is not healthy considering the number of contagiously sick people at the office, risking a persistent inflammatory load on the body. I don't see good workers wanting to work for Amazon, and I don't see good outcomes ahead for Amazon. It will remain a non-innovating laggard that is trivially outcompeted. The only reason AWS even profits is because of its outrageous egress cost.
scarface_74
All of the BigTech companies are forcing RTO. Hybrid work is just as bad RTO. Either way I can’t make an above local market wage and live in a low cost of living area.
Anytime any company reaches out to me and if I ask is it fully remote and they say “no” the conversation ends. I almost ended my initial conversation with AWS in 2020 when they reached out to me about an SDE position that would require an eventual relocation until they suggested I interview a ProServe (no longer there),
I’ve since stopped conversations for a similar position at GCP once they said it would be hybrid. Not that I would ever work for a large company again unless I didn’t have a choice.
OutOfHere
Hybrid work is just as bad if you live well outside of a commuting distance. If you live within a commuting distance, it is somewhat acceptable if it's about two days a week with a decent salary.
Good remote jobs are very difficult to get as they are very competitive, so hybrid jobs fill that void for those who can commute.
5x/wk RTO is nothing but a means of growth control and cheap layoffs.
Drunkfoowl
[dead]
I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy.
Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a “Day 2” company now and not out in front of trends
As if the original RTO policies weren’t bad enough for instance, now they are forcing their “field by design” workers to be in the office 5 days a week when they aren’t at a customers site. These are the consultants (full time employees), sales, SAs etc who spend most of their time interacting with the customer and where you rarely have your internal teammates in your same office.
Before anyone asked why I worked there if I knew it was shitty. I worked remotely the entire time, it looked great on my resume and I like money. It definitely opened some doors