Jeff Bezos says this business is becoming Amazon’s next ‘pillar’

Amazon’s next pillar could be built on a foundation of silicon. In a new interview with Fortune, Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom chip business is on track to become one of Amazon’s most durable businesses, placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company. “A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos told Fortune.

“What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.” The comments offer one of Bezos’ clearest public endorsements yet of Amazon’s push to design its own chips for artificial intelligence, an increasingly important strategy as demand for AI computing soars and companies look for alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant processors. More than a decade of investment Amazon has invested heavily in custom silicon through Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip startup it acquired in 2015. The company now develops its own AI chips under the Trainium and Inferentia brands, designed to train and run large language models while reducing costs for customers using Amazon Web Services.

AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. Anthropic trains and runs its Claude models on Trainium, and OpenAI has committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, ramping in 2027. The company disclosed revenue for its in-house data center chips for the first time earlier this year, and since then its Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chips have grown to a combined annual run rate of more than $20 billion.

Amazon has been pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, including new data centers and custom networking hardware. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly argued that demand for AI computing will remain strong for years, making investments in chips, servers, networking equipment, and power generation essential to the company’s long-term growth. In an earnings release earlier this year, Jassy signaled plans to pour a record $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, citing “seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.” The real potential for Amazon’s chips business could come in going beyond the walls of its own data c…