Amazon Doubles Down On India: CEO Andy Jassy Announces $48 Billion Investment | CNBC TV18

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. I've been to the country many times and it's exciting to be here.

We are. So, as you said, we've invested about 40 billion dollars since 2010 in India. And we announced another 35 billion by 2030, and we're upping that by another 13 billion. So an additional 48 billion total by the year 2030.

I'd say this additional 13 billion will be largely AWS and cloud and AI, just the pace at which AI is growing, and the pace at which AI is growing here in India is really remarkable.

Well, I think AI is the most transformative technology of our lifetime, which is saying a lot because we've lived through the internet, mobile, and the cloud. But it's going to change every single customer experience that we know and enable all sorts of new ones that we only imagined before. You can just look at the rate of growth. When we started AWS 20 years ago, the first three years we felt like we were growing really fast, and the business was a 57 million dollar annual run rate. If I look at the first three years of this wave of AI in AWS, it's over 15 billion dollars annual run rate – 260 times larger than what we had at the beginning of AWS. So it's growing unbelievably quickly. In the last quarter, we grew 28% year over year in AWS on a very large 150 billion dollar annual revenue run rate. That's very unusual. The way the cash cycle works in a business like AWS is you have to lay out the cash for data centers, hardware, chips, and networking gear in advance of when you can monetize it. In the early years, when you're investing a lot of capital expense, until your revenue growth starts to outpace your capital expense growth, you'll have headwinds in free cash flow. But once revenue growth starts to outpace CapEx growth, which will happen in a couple years, you really like the return on invested capital and free cash flow. That's what I think will happen here. We've had an example of that in the first phase of AWS, where you really like the operating income, free cash flow, and ROIC. Same pattern in AI. Because we have this really unusual opportunity where everything's going to be reinvented with AI, if we're able to successfully get customers capacity with the right services at the right service levels, our business 5 to 10 years down the road will be much larger on revenue, operating income, and free cash flow.

Well, I think we will end up generating much larger free cash flow for Amazon and for our shareholders in the next 5 to 10 years. I don't know exactly which year, but typically you invest a lot of this capital up front, and then you really like the free cash flow returns a couple few years down the road. I expect the same thing here.