Davos 2026: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy 1/21/26

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Hey, Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

Andy Jassy (0:11)

Oh, that sounds easier than I thought.

SPEAKER_2 (0:14)

You got this.

Becky Quick (0:15)

Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_1 (0:16)

Now, where did I put my keys?

SPEAKER_2 (0:19)

You will find them where you left them.

SPEAKER_5 (0:23)

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss.

SPEAKER_6 (0:25)

Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, member NYSE SIPC.

Andy Jassy (0:30)

Thy ticket, Lady Jennifer of Coolidge.

SPEAKER_2 (0:33)

Well, many thanks, good sir.

Cameron Costa (0:35)

Here is my Discover card.

Becky Quick (0:38)

They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs? Yeah, they do here.

Andy Jassy (0:42)

Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop.

SPEAKER_2 (0:45)

Get it with the times.

SPEAKER_6 (0:47)

With the times?

SPEAKER_5 (0:48)

You're playing the lute.

SPEAKER_2 (0:51)

Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

SPEAKER_1 (0:53)

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide based on the February 2025 Nielsen Report.

Andy Jassy (1:04)

We did a lot of pre-buying in the early part of 2025 to enable us to try and keep prices as low as possible for customers. And a lot of our third party sellers did a lot of forward staging in our fulfillment network for the same reasons. And that supply has run out in the fall. And so you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items.

Cameron Costa (1:31)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, an extended interview on tariffs and consumers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Andy Jassy (1:40)

Consumers have been pretty resilient. They continue to spend, they continue to shop. I think that wherever they can, they are trying to trade down in price.

Cameron Costa (1:50)

The power and the infrastructure demands of AI.

Andy Jassy (1:54)

Power has been short, you know, in the US, around the world, there is a power shortage. I think that it is better than it was 18 months ago and still not as plentiful as we all need.

Cameron Costa (2:06)

Plus how Amazon fits into the entire AI ecosystem with Nvidia semiconductor chips and with chips of its own.

Andy Jassy (2:15)

If you're building a big inference business like we are and you want to have reasonable margins, if you're not pursuing your own custom AI silicon, you're going to be structurally disadvantaged.

Cameron Costa (2:24)

I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. Squawk Pod reports from Davos, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy begins right now.

It is Davos Week. So many of the world's CEOs, politicians and journalists are in a small town in the Swiss Alps, crunching through snow for panels, speeches, interviews and yes, a few parties. Most of CNBC's Davos coverage comes in the form of our interviews on TV. On Squawk Box, we bring you conversations with anthropic CEO Dario Amodi, for example, or the heads of banks like Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, Morgan Stanley's Ted Pick, even with heads of state like President Donald Trump. But Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin are busy the rest of the day in Switzerland, sometimes moderating panels and interviews at CNBC's home base in Davos.

SPEAKER_6 (3:30)

Welcome to CNBC House. Please take your seats. Hello, everybody.

Andy Jassy (3:35)

Welcome to CNBC at Davos. It's so great to see all of you here.

Cameron Costa (3:40)

That's where this next conversation took place, a longer format morning interview with Becky Quick and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

Becky Quick (3:51)

Thank you to Andy Jassy for joining us this morning. And thank you to all of you for being here, too. This is new for me. First time I'm doing one of these interviews like this. And I'm really excited to do it with Andy. He covers so much ground. And I know everybody here knows Amazon. And everybody here knows Andy Jassy. But I think it's really hard to understand the scope of the company, what it is and what it does without knowing Amazon by the numbers. So let's walk through that just a little bit. Amazon first of all has a market cap of more than $2.5 trillion. If you take a look at their employees, it's 1.5 million employees. They are the second largest private employer on the planet. If you're looking at revenue for the company, for the most recent year that was reported, 2024, it was $638 billion. And I think if you want to break down just the rate of growth at some of their units that have been pretty spectacular, AWS, the cloud services unit of the company, this year I think is on an annualized run rate to have revenue of $132 billion. That's up from $108 billion last year. And if you roll back 11 years, it was only $4.8 billion. That just tells you about what Andy has done just in terms of the unit that he used to run, where things are going and how much growth there is. They run everything from projects like Vulkan, which looks at robotics. They've got AI projects like Sageworks and Bedrock. They have things like Amazon Pharmacy. They have Amazon Prime Video. So it's hard to really understand the scope until you start looking through some of those things. Andy, I thought we could start today by talking a little bit about how you spend your time. Not because I want to know everything you do in your day, but because I think it would show a little bit about what your priorities are for the company. How would you break down a typical day or a week?