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Matthew Garman

CEO of Amazon Web Services, Amazon

Search every verified Matthew Garman interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, discussed AWS's strategic focus on agentic AI in two recent podcast appearances. He said that when he became CEO in June 2024, AWS chose not to rush AI solutions to market despite a narrative that it had fallen behind competitors, and instead made agentic AI its next major business bet. Garman described dedicating small teams to build services, such as an inference engine under Bedrock with roughly six people, and forming partnerships with frontier model providers including Anthropic and OpenAI. He also advised customers to avoid proof-of-concept projects, arguing they often overlook production concerns like data protection and compliance. In a separate conversation, Garman addressed infrastructure and investment topics. He stated that AWS plans to spend $220 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, citing massive demand, and announced the company intends to purchase 2 million NVIDIA GPUs over the next couple of years. He said AWS is intentionally reserving GPU capacity for startups, which he called the "lifeblood" of the company. Garman also discussed how AI is changing organizational structures, noting that smaller teams can now build services faster, and addressed enterprise trust in autonomous agents. He said AWS is building components like compute sandboxes and agent permissions to support agentic workflows, and he defended the company's environmental record, mentioning efforts around renewable energy, water positivity, and free air cooling in data centers.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“When I looked at where the landscape was going to go and where I thought AI was really going to transform businesses, if you don't really get to an agent world where work is actually being done by the AI, then you're still in a content creation world. I felt very convicted that if this business was going to be big, it was going to be in the agent world. And that meant we had to put a stake in the ground. We also had ”

“I think we need to be more vocal and be more upfront. Because we actually do a ton that's really beneficial both for the communities we operate in. We think a ton about how do we bring renewable energy to these data centers. How do we think about being water positive? Actually our data centers use a really really small amount of water. We mostly use free air cooling. How do we think about being great participants in ”

“The capex expense needed to go deploy kind of all of the compute that everyone needs right now is massive. $220 billion for 26. It's a larger expense than we've ever had, maybe any company has ever had in a single year. And we don't anticipate slowing down anytime soon because the demand is just massive. And so at some point you're limited by how fast can you build data centers, how fast can you deploy capital, how f”

“We think that it's important to not overlegislate there and give that flexibility for customers to use whichever models they find to be the best fit. And that's actually why we really focus on having all of those available inside of Bedrock so that customers can choose which ones they want to use.”

“We have great insight into when that revenue is going to land. And so it's pretty well known for us and as Andy mentioned, much of our capacity has already spoken through through the end of 27 and even through much of 28. And so as we're investing, we're getting 5-year commitments from customers. We're getting these long-term commitments. And so, we're out there making investments to keep being able to grow the busin”

“We've launched our European sovereign cloud which is a first-of-its-kind region that's landed really well with our European customers. The idea there is that we've insulated that European region, it actually has an independent governing board, and every bit of data ... all lives inside of the European region.”

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