Amazon CEO Affirms Massive Investment In AI In Annual Letter To Shareholders

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (photo: x @R4yt3d)

JAKARTA Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasized the importance of massive investment in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) to maintain the company's competitiveness. This was conveyed in an annual letter to shareholders released on Thursday, April 10, an annual tradition that Amazon stakeholders have always been waiting for.

"If your mission is to make customer life better and easier every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be revolutionized by AI, then you have to invest in deep and wide in AI," Jassy wrote.

According to him, large investments are needed to acquire AI chips and build data centers. He stressed that this aggressive move would bring long-term benefits to Amazon's customers, shareholders, and businesses as a whole.

Amazon, like its competitors, is racing to develop a generative AI. The company has launched various chatbots aimed at sellers, businesses, and general consumers. Last month, after experiencing several delays and absorbing billions of dollars in investment, Amazon released the latest version of Alexa's voice assistant, which is now embedded with advanced AI technology and is named Alexa+.

In addition, Amazon has also invested around $8 billion into the company's AI Anthropic startup, and integrated the company's AI Claude software into Alexa+.

Jassy's statement was in line with what Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the day before at the Google Cloud event. Pichai revealed that Alphabet plans to spend around 75 billion US dollars this year to build data center capacity, stressing that opportunities in the AI sector are the biggest so far.

Concerns About Import Tariffs Not Impacted On Requests

Despite concerns over the United States' import rates, particularly against goods from China, amid shaking the global market, Jassy did not mention the issue in his letter. However, in a separate interview with CNBC, he acknowledged that Amazon had accelerated a number of inventory bookings to anticipate potential supply chain disruptions.

We haven't seen any significant changes in consumer behavior. People are still buying. Indeed, there are several categories where consumers are seen buying earlier, but it's not clear if it's an anomaly or a trend," said Jassy.

Another retail company, Walmart, also announced its commitment to keeping prices low despite noting any volatility in shopping behavior since February due to tariff uncertainty.

As of Wednesday Amazon's shares have fallen 13% throughout 2025, smaller than Alphabet and Apple, but sharper than Microsoft's 7% drop.

However, Jassy stated that concerns over tariffs did not affect Amazon's data center expansion plan. "The demand for AWS and AI is very high at the moment. Its growth is extraordinary so we don't see any slowdown, and we will continue to build on it," he stressed.

Compensation Of CEOs And Shareholder Issues

In an annual proxy statement report released on the same day, Amazon revealed that Jassy's total compensation in 2024 reached 40.1 million US dollars, up from 29.2 million US dollars in the previous year. This increase was largely driven by a 40% increase in Amazon's share price over the past year.

Amazon also received eight proposals from shareholders, including those calling for clearer sustainability targets, transparency in data usage in AI, and working conditions in warehouses. However, the company recommends shareholders to reject the entire proposal.

Interestingly, in this year's report, Amazon removed all references to "diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI)", which in the last year's report was recorded 21 times. In fact, DEI's expertise previously listed in the profiles of two board directors, Jamie S. Gorelick and Jonathan J. Rubinstein, has also been removed. Instead, Amazon added a small section that emphasizes the importance of inclusive experience'.

As a tradition, this year's letter also includes the first shareholder letter from 1997 signed by Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos as a reminder of the company's basic philosophy from the start.