• A slew of business and tech execs are scheduled to speak at Tuesday's Saudi-US Investment Forum.
• The forum will focus on a range of issues, from AI, to energy, to manufacturing.
• Tuesday's forum coincides with Trump's crucial visit to Saudi Arabia.

As President Donald Trump embarks on the first international trip of his second term, a small crowd of Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives are also jetting off to Saudi Arabia.

On Tuesday, executives from companies like Google, Nvidia, and BlackRock are scheduled to speak at the Saudi-US Investment Forum, according to the event's website. The forum will cover a range of topics — AI, energy, defense, and manufacturing, to name a few — and host some of the kingdom's power brokers.

Investment is top of mind beyond Tuesday's conference: Trump has said he wants to secure $1 trillion worth of deals during his trip to the gulf, multiple outlets reported.

Here are some of the biggest names scheduled to take the stage. Representatives for the Saudi-US Investment Forum did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Andy Jassy, Amazon

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is listed as a featured speaker as Saudi Arabia is working to establish itself as a global AI leader. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud business, has committed to investing more than $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia in the coming years to build data centers for the computing power needed to run AI models.

Alex Karp, Palantir

The Palantir CEO is scheduled to speak at the conference, and has recently credited a pro-defense tech wave for solid first quarter performance. Alex Karp said on a recent earnings call that part of Palantir's success had to do with "an unvarnished cacophony of the combination of 20 years of investment and a massive cultural shift in the US."

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is listed as a speaker, just a few months after Tesla announced it will be entering the Saudi market. The world's richest man has previously had a somewhat rocky relationship with Saudi Arabia over unsuccessful business deals.

Larry Fink

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, launched an investment firm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last year, and CEO Larry Fink stressed the firm's global reach on a recent earnings call. He was once a leading voice on issues like ESG and DEI, but the firm's recent annual letter didn't mention either issue. Instead, Fink wrote in it that BlackRock is now betting big on the private market.

David Sacks

Trump's AI and crypto czar is among the White House officials scheduled to speak. On Sunday evening, David Sacks posted about arriving in the Middle East on X, saying that America needs to be the "partner-of-choice" when it comes to AI, and that "effective AI diplomacy is vital now more than ever."

Jensen Huang

Representatives from Nvidia spoke at this year's Global AI Summit, hosted in Saudi Arabia, and now CEO Jensen Huang is set to represent the chips giant at Tuesday's conference. A top Saudi AI official told CNBC in September that the country hoped to get access to Nvidia's high-performance chips within the year. Groq, a semiconductor startup and potential competitor to Nvidia, announced that it has gotten a $1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to expand the delivery of its AI chips.

Jane Fraser

Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser is among the Wall Street leaders slated to speak. She also spoke at Saudi Arabia's Future Investment Initiative in October.

Stephen Schwarzman

Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, also spoke at Saudi Arabia's Future Investment Initiative ahead of the presidential election and said he thought that Trump would be a better president the second time around. Last year, the billionaire said he wants Blackstone to become the "largest financial investor" in global AI infrastructure.

Kelly Ortberg, Boeing

Boeing has had a relationship with Saudi Arabia since the 1940s, according to its website. Though CEO Kelly Ortberg is scheduled to speak in Saudi Arabia, Boeing has made headlines related to a different country in the Middle East, after multiple outlets reported that the Qatari royal family plans to give the Trump administration a Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet to be used as Air Force One. The plane is worth a staggering $400 million and has been criticized by figures on both political parties for potential conflicts of interest.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet and Google

Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet, is scheduled to speak, and Google has made recent investments in Saudi Arabia. In 2024, the company announced that it was opening an AI hub in Saudi Arabia, and a 2025 partnership between Accenture and Google Cloud seeks to further generative AI capacities in the country.

Arvind Krishna, IBM

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna recently announced a new slate of AI products from IBM as the company seeks to grow its generative AI business. In February, IBM announced it was expanding its AI efforts in Saudi Arabia and the company opened regional headquarters in the country last year.

Omeed Malik, Founder and President of 1789 capital

Omeed Malik founder and president of 1789 Capital, a VC firm that counts Donald Trump Jr. among its partners. He recently started a private club in Washington, DC, that caters to the MAGA social scene once co-hosted a Trump fundraiser that raised upwards of $10 million. 1789 Capital invests in energy and software, among other industries, and it bills itself as anti-ESG. Instead, it focuses on "EIG" — entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth.

• Companies continue to lay off managers.
• Match Group, Amazon, Google, and Meta are thinning out middle managers, flattening org charts.
• Mark Zuckerberg was an early advocate of the "Great Flattening," describing it as an overhiring fix.

"How many managers to have — what are the pros and cons of managers?" The question was posed to Mark Zuckerberg nearly two years ago during an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman.

At the time, the Meta CEO — still sporting his shorter "Caesar" haircut — had kicked off the "Great Flattening" trend, culling middle managers amid his "year of efficiency" as a correction to overhiring during the pandemic.

But as companies beyond Big Tech, the latest being the Tinder owner Match Group, pare back managerial roles, Zuckerberg's answer to the podcaster's question in June 2023 remains relevant — and helps explain why CEOs continue to thin out management ranks.

The Facebook founder began by acknowledging that managers are an important component of a company like Meta.

"I believe a lot in management," he said. "I think there are some people who think that it doesn't matter as much, but look, we have a lot of younger people at the company. For them, this is their first job, and people need to grow and learn in their career."

Zuckerberg said there was "a mathematical way" he thought about the ratio of employees to managers and making cuts.

Before Meta's layoffs, Zuckerberg said he had asked about the average number of direct reports each manager had at the company and learned it was about three to four. He said he felt it should be more like seven to eight. The lower numbers made sense at the time, Zuckerberg said, as Meta was hiring a ton and helping newcomers ramp up.

"So in a world where we're not adding so many people as quickly, is it as valuable to have a lot of managers who have extra capacity waiting for new people? No, right?" Zuckerberg said.

He said he decided to "defragment the organization," thinning out the ranks of middle management, which "decreases the latency on information going up and down the chain and I think empowers people more."

It all added up to a leaner organization that he felt could move faster in both decision-making and execution.

Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg mentioned that the cuts came at a time of uncertainty in the world. As companies navigate geopolitical tensions and President Donald Trump's trade war, Zuckerberg's words in 2023 likely ring true to many CEOs today.

"I just feel the external world is quite volatile right now," Zuckerberg said in the interview. "And I wanted to make sure that we had a stable position."

Middle managers have increasingly found a target on their backs in recent years. Massive companies have followed Meta's lead over the past year, with Amazon and Google moving to flatten their org charts amid a renewed focus on greater efficiency.

Their CEOs have similarly voiced their reasons.

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy said in September that the company would increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of March.

"Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today," he said at the time. In short, he told employees in a November all-hands, "I hate bureaucracy."

Google is cutting manager, director, and vice president roles by 10%, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in December.

Pichai said Google had made changes designed to simplify the company and boost its efficiency, two employees who heard the CEO's comments previously told Business Insider. In September 2022, he'd said he wanted Google to be 20% more efficient; months later, the company conducted a massive round of layoffs, eliminating 12,000 jobs.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai told staff in an email about those layoffs. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

Salesforce in 2023 slashed some layers of management and turned some managers into individual contributors, with the goal of reducing the "spans" and "layers of control" across the company. Earlier that year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced layoffs of 10% of the workforce as part of a cost-cutting restructuring plan. In his memo to staff, he cited pandemic overhiring and a "challenging" economic environment as reasons for the cuts.

Middle managers made up nearly one-third of layoffs among white-collar workers in 2023, an analysis by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg found.

Match Group, the parent company of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, announced this week a 13% reduction in its workforce, affecting one in five managers.

Beyond tech, the focus on flattening has extended to behemoths of other industries.

Citi in 2023 announced it was paring back its layers of management from 13 to eight; the company later announced cuts affecting 1,500 managerial roles. At the start of 2024, UPS said it was laying off 12,000 of its 85,000 managers.

Some workplace experts have said the Great Flattening targeting middle managers could hurt workforces, as middle managers often carry out vital responsibilities like executing on upper management's goals and boosting employees' morale and performance.

The trend is continuing as companies decide that restructuring to decrease the number of managers is the right move to appease investors who are zeroed in on efficiency, especially after the pandemic hiring boom in tech.

Or as Zuckerberg previously said:

"I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

• Amazon is developing a new AI coding tool, internally codenamed Kiro.
• Kiro aims to enhance software development with AI agent technology and a multi-modal interface.
• AI coding assistants are rapidly growing, with major tech firms investing heavily in the space.

AI coding assistants are exploding in popularity. Amazon wants a piece of it.

According to an internal document obtained by Business Insider, Amazon Web Services is building a new AI coding tool, codenamed Kiro.

The software development application taps into AI agents to analyze user prompts and existing data, generating code in "near real-time," the document said.

Kiro is a web and desktop app that can be customized to work with first-party and third-party AI agents, Amazon explained in the document. It also taps into knowledge bases, extensions, and themes further enhancing developer productivity.

Kiro will feature a multi-modal interface, allowing developers to input not just text but also visual diagrams and other contextual information, the document stated.

AWS offers an existing AI coding assistant called Amazon Q. The document obtained by BI suggests that Kiro may be a broader application that taps into multiple AI agents to automate or speed up many aspects of software development.

The tool is expected to be able to auto-generate technical design documents, flag potential issues, and offer code optimizations, Amazon explained in its internal document.

"There is an opportunity to reimagine how AI is used to build software at an exponentially faster rate of innovation and higher product quality," the company wrote.

Amazon disses other AI coding tools

The internal document critiques existing AI coding tools as being locked into "code-centric" interfaces that slow developers down. Kiro aims to "democratize" software creation, minimizing time-to-code and maximizing productivity, it said.

AWS had considered launching Kiro in late June, according to the document, though it remains uncertain whether that timeline is still in effect.

AWS's spokesperson declined to comment on Kiro specifically, but told BI that the company is working on AI agent features for its existing products, like the Q developer tool.

"AI agents are quickly transforming the developer experience, and we are rapidly creating innovative new approaches to software development that take full advantage of these powerful agentic capabilities," the spokesperson said. "We're only getting started."

'Explosion of coding agents'

AI coding assistants have seen a sharp surge in growth lately.

CEO Andy Jassy called out the growth of AI tools such as Cursor and Vercel during Amazon's earnings call last week, highlighting an "explosion of coding agents" among AWS customers.

Google and Microsoft both said that around 30% of their code is now written by AI. David Sacks, the White House's AI and crypto czar, recently called coding assistants the "first big break-out application of AI," noting explosive growth in tools like Cursor and Replit.

"The ramifications of moving from a world of code scarcity to code abundance are profound," Sacks wrote on X last week.

Startups in the space are attracting significant attention. Anysphere, which built Cursor, raised a huge funding round recently, and OpenAI agreed to buy AI coding startup Windsurf for $3 billion.

AI may change the role of human coders

By 2028, 9 out of 10 enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants, up from less than 14% in early 2024, according to Gartner estimates. It's unclear how this will reshape the role of human coders.

Last year, AWS CEO Matt Garman said it's possible that most software developers will not be coding in the future because of new AI tools, and that Amazon has to help employees "upskill and learn about new technologies" to boost their productivity, BI previously reported.

Amazon faced early hurdles with its Q coding assistant, sparking internal concerns over high costs and lackluster performance compared to rivals like Microsoft's Copilot, BI previously reported. The company's spokesperson said user experience with generative AI is "constantly evolving" and pointed to customers, including Deloitte and ADP, that saw productivity gains with Amazon Q.

Amazon believes tools like Kiro will simplify common tasks, such as integrating Stripe payments, while empowering developers to do more with less, according to the document.

"With Kiro, developers read less but comprehend more, code less but build more, and review less but release more," it said.

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• Andy Jassy said keeping a strong culture isn't a given and identified 2 issues that needed to be tackled.
• Jassy said remote work stifles innovation and gets in the way of culture being taught.
• Management layers are another key area that Amazon is seeking to reduce.

Andy Jassy said he thinks Amazon has a strong company culture, but staying that way isn't a given as the company expands and parts of the business evolve.

"You have to keep working on strengthening the parts of your culture that you see being stretched if you want to keep being successful culturally," Jassy said on Tuesday during a speaking event at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit.

In an effort to restore Amazon's strong sense of culture, the company rolled out several changes, including a 5-day return to office. The CEO said the company pinpointed two problem areas it needed to tackle: remote work and bureaucracy.

Culture can't be taught remotely

Jassy said many of the company's inventions have emerged from "messy, wandering meetings," where things may not initially click, but employees stick around to work it out on a whiteboard or revisit the problem and solve it later on.

Since bringing employees back to the office three days a week, Jassy said the company observed an improvement in collaboration and creative problem-solving.

"What you find is people riff on top of each other's ideas better if they're together," Jassy said. "Turns out, sometimes it's actually useful to interrupt each other, because you get to a faster spot, more quickly, you feel that energy."

Jassy said when employees work remotely, they tend to move on to the next task after their meeting ends, and "you just don't find that type of invention together."

As Amazon works to overhaul its organizational structure, Jassy said that culture isn't something that can be instilled from a distance.

"When you're in a meeting together, and you're watching the body language and you're watching people's expressions, you internalize the culture much better," Jassy said.

Jassy added that teaching is much more effective if you can walk over to someone after a meeting and add context or reassurance about what took place. For example, if it was a challenging topic, Jassy said he might tell a colleague, "Don't be surprised that that was a hard meeting. This is a really difficult topic." Or, he might say, for the next meeting, "think about these three things."

Limiting 'pre-meetings for the pre-meetings'

Amazon has a concept of one-way and two-way door decisions. Jassy said the "overwhelming majority of decisions" Amazon makes are two-way door decisions, which the company has said should require minimal executive oversight. However, Jassy said it wants those decisions to be made by the people who are doing the work.

Jassy said as the company has gotten larger, it's ended up with increasing layers of management. While many added processes were meant to bring organization, they've led to a place where there's "a pre-meeting for the pre-meeting for the decision," Jassy said. When it comes to actually making those decisions, employees may also feel like they lack ownership of them, Jassy said.

"That's what we'd like to try and limit," Jassy said. "We really want our owners doing the real work, to own the two-way door decisions and to be able to move quickly and autonomously."

The decision to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% is part of that effort, Jassy said. The plan also includes directives for managers to take on more direct reports, slow down on senior-level hiring, and enact pay cuts for some employees.

"We want to flatten our organizations, to move faster and to drive more ownership," Jassy said.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Andy Jassy has 6 tips for big companies that want to feel more like a startup.
• The Amazon CEO emphasizes solving customer problems and increasing employee ownership of employees.
• He also said speed, scrappiness, and willingness to take risks are key to operating like a startup.

Andy Jassy is set on reshaping Amazon into a startup-like structure, despite the tech giant employing over one million people globally.

"We want to flatten our organizations, to move faster and to drive more ownership," the Amazon CEO said Tuesday during the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit.

Jassy said that when companies scale, there are "all sorts of ways" they can start to slow down. In an effort to emulate the workflow of a startup, Amazon plans to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%, and has also mandated a 5-day return to office to help drive innovation.

Amazon isn't necessarily looking to revert to its venture-backed days, but it's on a mission to regain some of the agility it had early on. Jassy said these are the six things big companies should do to feel like a startup.

1. Seek solutions to real customer problems

Jassy said that while a lot of tech companies "fall in love with technology" and build interesting products, they fail to solve "anything remarkable."

Meanwhile, startups are on a mission to solve customer problems, the Amazon's CEO said. With limited time and funding available, founders need to be laser-focused on building a product that will make a lasting impact on their target market.

"That's what we got to make sure we spend our time on," Jassy said.

The CEO added that even in times of tariff uncertainty and geopolitical risk, Amazon has continued to tell itself that it's "here to make customers' lives easier and better." The CEO said all of Amazon's businesses have areas that can be improved for customers, and that's what it's trying to stay focused on.

2. Hire a lot of builders

A strong culture of innovation is often a distinguishing factor of a startup. Jassy said that companies need to have a disproportionate number of builders, which he defines as people who like to invent products. Those people "dissect the customer experience," figure out where there are gaps, and then recreate the product, he said.

Jassy said the process of building often begins with listening to what customers are struggling with.

"If you're listening to them and you understand the need, then you can invent on their behalf," Jassy said.

The demand for innovation is part of the reason Amazon enacted a five-day return-to-office policy. Jassy said that "invention is stronger" when employees can work together in person.

3. Think like an owner

Jassy said companies that want to operate like startups also need owners. That means people "who really feel accountable," the CEO said.

"You need people to think about, what would I do if this were my money? What would I do if I owned all the resources?" Jassy said.

Jassy said the company's effort to flatten its workforce is about making employees return to that ownership mindset.

4. Move quick

Amazon has been on a mission to slash its bureaucratic practices, whether through a "no bureaucracy" email alias or by reducing management layers.

"As you get bigger, especially as you have a lot of managers, they keep layering in processes, and pretty soon you have process upon process upon process," Jassy said. "That really slows people down so they can't get the real work done."

In his former role when he was managing Amazon Web Services, Jassy said he spoke to a lot of CEOs who would tell him they were too large to move quickly.

Jassy said he believes speed is a "leadership decision." However, if companies want to move fast, Jassy said they need to figure out what's slowing them down and get rid of those barriers.

5. 'Be scrappy'

Jassy said that companies can't assign 50 to 100 people for every new project that needs to be completed. When Amazon started its computing service, it had 13 people, Jassy said.

"You can get going with a small number of people and build something that people actually find resonant," Jassy said, adding that companies can "keep iterating from there."

6. Take risks

When companies expand, they often become increasingly risk-averse, Jassy said. The CEO said that highly driven, Type A personalities can fall into the mindset of playing it safe. Those types of people, whom Amazon often hires, aren't used to failure and worry about being "ostracized if they get it wrong," Jassy said.

Jassy said the "only way" to create something unique is to do something different than what others have done.

"And you have to be willing to take risk and be willing to fail sometimes," the CEO said.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Amazon's CEO has advice for companies that want to cut management layers.
• Andy Jassy said companies should have a solid feedback loop in place to figure out the biggest problems.
• He also said companies need to keep working on resolving the issue if they want to see change.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company is on a mission to "operate like the world's largest startup."

"We want to flatten our organizations, to move faster and to drive more ownership," the Amazon CEO said during a speaking event at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit on Tuesday.

In addition to a five-day return to office mandate, Amazon has undertaken a plan to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% across the company. Jassy said it will have beaten that goal by the end of the first quarter.

Jassy said the company hasn't perfected its mission yet, but companies wanting to follow the same path of reducing bureaucracy should follow these three steps.

Step 1. Address the issue

"The very first thing is the leadership team deciding they want to actually change it and resolving themselves to take action," Jassy said about cutting down on bureaucracy.

Jassy said in Amazon's case, it decided to flatten the organization because it wanted to give individual contributors more ownership.

Jassy said this step isn't "simple" because people get used to operating in a certain way, and then it can feel impossible to change the organizational structure.

Step 2. Figure out the biggest problems

If companies decide they want to move fast, Jassy said they first have to figure out what's slowing them down. Jassy advises companies to develop good feedback loops to sort out those issues.

"It's really hard to see some of the red tape deep in your organizations," Jassy said, adding that visibility can help you "knock down a bunch of things."

Jassy said Amazon started a "no bureaucracy email alias" where it encouraged anyone in the company experiencing bureaucracy to email him.

In about six months, he said he received over 1,000 emails, all of which were read. Not all of the emails included examples of bureaucracy, he said, but many did. Jassy said he draws a distinction between "process" and bureaucracy, and considers the latter to be processes that are layered in without adding "any real creative value." The emails have already helped change 375 processes, Jassy said.

Step 3. Keep working at it

Jassy said that there are all sorts of "natural ways" that companies can get bogged down as they grow. He added that while Amazon has a "really strong culture," it's not its "birthright to keep having a strong culture."

While Amazon leadership may have decided to tackle the problem and shift its organizational structure, that doesn't mean its problems were solved overnight. Jassy said that Amazon still hasn't quite nailed its mission to flatten its workforce, and companies have to "keep iterating at it."

"You have to keep working on strengthening the parts of your culture that you see being stretched if you want to keep being successful culturally," Jassy said.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Andy Jassy said the pace of transitioning to AI is a factor to keep an eye on.
• He worries that the country's education system won't set people up for the future economy.
• Amazon has invested heavily in AI, and Jassy said he bets it will change nearly "every experience."

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy considers himself an AI optimist, but even he has reservations about how quickly we're adopting the technology.

"One of the things we have to watch is that the pace of this transition may be quick, it may be quicker than other technology transitions in the past," Jassy said while speaking at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit on Tuesday. "We have to make sure that we're responsible about the way the algorithms work and the way the models work."

Jassy said there will inevitably be unintended consequences of adopting AI and that "one of the biggest problems" doesn't have to do with the technology at all, but instead the country's education system. He said he's worried about a declining quality in education and whether it will equip people for the tools of the future, like coding apps.

"It's going to be very empowering, but we've got to make sure that our education keeps up so people are successful in this new economy," Jassy said. President Donald Trump has sought to reshape the country's education system, from K-12 through the university level, during his first 100 days in office.

Ultimately, Jassy said he believes that AI is likely the largest technology transformation since the internet and will improve "almost every experience that we can imagine right now."

Amazon uses AI across its business — Jassy said the company has a "very substantial investment" in the technology — and is working on a new "reasoning" AI model tentatively scheduled to launch in June, Business Insider previously reported. Other companies, like Google and OpenAI, have released their own reasoning models.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

• Andy Jassy advises CEOs to "stay focused" on customers amid geopolitical uncertainty.
• Jassy emphasizes prioritizing customer needs instead of overthinking tariff impacts.
• He says leaders should acknowledge what's going on but focus on the things they can control.

Andy Jassy said he doesn't have the "perfect answer" for CEOs as companies grapple with tariff whiplash — but he has some advice: "Stay focused."

"You can get distracted by, you know, are there going to be tariffs? How high are the tariffs? Are there not going to be tariffs? What do other countries' relationships look like with these countries?" the Amazon CEO said Tuesday during the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit.

Jassy said the number of things going on around the world and within the US right now "can be dizzying." Since the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has signed over 100 executive orders, made large cuts to the federal government, and gone back and forth about tariff rates, which now stand at 10% on imports from most countries. The levies go as high as 245% on some goods from China. Despite uncertainty, Jassy said companies still have a purpose to fulfill.

"At the end of the day, we have a job to do," Jassy said, "which is to figure out what customers want and then to go deliver it for them."

Leaders need to remember "what matters most" in those moments, he added. While they should acknowledge that there's a lot going on, they should keep in mind that they can't control everything, Jassy said.

He added that "it's not easy" to stay focused amid uncertainty. Even Amazon hasn't been immune to political friction. Jassy's comments came as the company denied a report that said it would list how much tariffs contribute to an item's price. The White House criticized the idea as a "hostile and political act."

Jassy said Amazon has continued to tell itself internally that it's "here to make customers' lives easier and better." The CEO said all of Amazon's businesses have areas that can be improved for customers, and that's where it tries to spend its time.

"Well-intended, passionate, mission-focused people read or hear about things and wonder how it's going to affect them," Jassy said.

Sometimes, those things do influence companies, and companies need to figure out how to operate accordingly. But by not reacting to all the noise, leaders will save themselves from having to do "every little bit of early-stage work," he said.

"By and large, if you stay focused on the issues you know customers care about, you will do right by your customers, and you just will start a much-higher starting spot," Jassy said.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

• Amazon addressed GPU shortages with internal tenets to guide the valuable resource's allocation.
• The company launched "Project Greenland" to streamline GPU distribution and prioritize ROI.
• Amazon employees now have better access to GPUs, the company said.

Amazon, like many other tech companies, has grappled with significant GPU shortages in recent years.

To address the problem, it created eight "tenets," or guiding principles, for approving employee graphics processing unit requests, according to an internal document seen by Business Insider.

These tenets are part of a broader effort to streamline Amazon's internal GPU distribution process. Last year, Amazon launched "Project Greenland," which one document called a "centralized GPU orchestration platform," to more efficiently allocate capacity across the company. It also pushed for tighter controls by prioritizing return on investment for each AI chip.

As a result, Amazon is no longer facing a GPU crunch, which strained the company last year.

"Amazon has ample GPU capacity to continue innovating for our retail business and other customers across the company," an Amazon spokesperson told BI. "AWS recognized early on that generative AI innovations are fueling rapid adoption of cloud computing services for all our customers, including Amazon, and we quickly evaluated our customers' growing GPU needs and took steps to deliver the capacity they need to drive innovation."

How Amazon decides who gets GPUs

Here are the eight tenets for GPU allocation, according to the internal Amazon document:

1. ROI + High Judgment thinking is required for GPU usage prioritization. GPUs are too valuable to be given out on a first-come, first-served basis. Instead, distribution should be determined based on ROI layered with common sense considerations, and provide for the long-term growth of the Company's free cash flow. Distribution can happen in bespoke infrastructure or in hours of a sharing/pooling tool.
2. Continuously learn, assess, and improve: We solicit new ideas based on continuous review and are willing to improve our approach as we learn more.
3. Avoid silo decisions: Avoid making decisions in isolation; instead, centralize the tracking of GPUs and GPU related initiatives in one place.
4. Time is critical: Scalable tooling is a key to moving fast when making distribution decisions which, in turn, allows more time for innovation and learning from our experiences.
5. Efficiency feeds innovation: Efficiency paves the way for innovation by encouraging optimal resource utilization, fostering collaboration and resource sharing.
6. Embrace risk in the pursuit of innovation: Acceptable level of risk tolerance will allow to embrace the idea of 'failing fast' and maintain an environment conducive to Research and Development.
7. Transparency and confidentiality: We encourage transparency around the GPU allocation methodology through education and updates on the wiki's while applying confidentiality around sensitive information on R&D and ROI sharable with only limited stakeholders. We celebrate wins and share lessons learned broadly.
8. GPUs previously given to fleets may be recalled if other initiatives show more value. Having a GPU doesn't mean you'll get to keep it.

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• GPU shortages delayed projects in Amazon's retail division last year.
• The company created a more efficient approval and monitoring process for internal GPU requests.
• Amazon says it now has "ample" GPU capacity across the company.

Last year, Amazon's huge retail business had a big problem: It couldn't get enough AI chips to get crucial work done.

With projects getting delayed, the Western world's largest e-commerce operation launched a radical revamp of internal processes and technology to tackle the issue, according to a trove of Amazon documents obtained by Business Insider.

The initiative offers a rare inside look at how a tech giant balances internal demand for these GPU components with supply from Nvidia and other industry sources.

Early in 2024, the generative AI boom was in full swing, with thousands of companies vying for access to the infrastructure needed to apply this powerful new technology.

Inside Amazon, some employees went months without securing GPUs, leading to delays that disrupted timely project launches across the company's retail division, a sector that spans its e-commerce platform and expansive logistics operations, according to the internal documents.

In July, Amazon launched Project Greenland, a "centralized GPU capacity pool" to better manage and allocate its limited GPU supply. The company also tightened approval protocols for internal GPU use, the documents show.

"GPUs are too valuable to be given out on a first-come, first-served basis," one of the Amazon guidelines stated. "Instead, distribution should be determined based on ROI layered with common sense considerations, and provide for the long-term growth of the Company's free cash flow."

Two years into a global shortage, GPUs remain a scarce commodity —even for some of the largest AI companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, said in February that the ChatGPT-maker was "out of GPUs," following a new model launch. Nvidia, the dominant GPU provider, has said it will be supply-constrained this year.

However, Amazon's efforts to tackle this problem may be paying off. By December, internal forecasts suggested the crunch would ease this year, with chip availability expected to improve, the documents showed.

In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said the company's retail arm, which sources GPUs through Amazon Web Services, now has full access to the AI processors.

"Amazon has ample GPU capacity to continue innovating for our retail business and other customers across the company," the spokesperson said. "AWS recognized early on that generative AI innovations are fueling rapid adoption of cloud computing services for all our customers, including Amazon, and we quickly evaluated our customers' growing GPU needs and took steps to deliver the capacity they need to drive innovation."

"Shovel-ready"

Amazon now demands hard data and return-on-investment proof for every internal GPU request, according to the documents obtained by BI.

Initiatives are "prioritized and ranked" for GPU allocation based on several factors, including the completeness of data provided and the financial benefit per GPU. Projects must be "shovel-ready," or approved for development, and prove they are in a competitive "race to market." They also have to provide a timeline for when actual benefits will be realized.

One internal document from late 2024 stated that Amazon's retail unit planned to distribute GPUs to the "next highest priority initiatives" as more supply became available in the first quarter of 2025.

The broader priority for Amazon's retail business is to ensure its cloud infrastructure spending generates the "highest return on investment through revenue growth or cost-to-serve reduction," one of the documents added.

Amazon's new GPU "tenets"

Amazon's retail team codified its approach into official "tenets" — internal guidelines that individual teams or projects create for faster decision-making. The tenets emphasize strong ROI, selective approvals, and a push for speed and efficiency.

And if a greenlit project underdelivers, its GPUs can be pulled back.

Here are the 8 tenets for GPU allocation, according to one of the Amazon documents:

1. ROl + High Judgment thinking is required for GPU usage prioritization. GPUs are too valuable to be given out on a first-come, first-served basis. Instead, distribution should be determined based on ROl layered with common sense considerations, and provide for the long-term growth of the Company's free cash flow. Distribution can happen in bespoke infrastructure or in hours of a sharing/pooling tool.
2. Continuously learn, assess, and improve: We solicit new ideas based on continuous review and are willing to improve our approach as we learn more.
3. Avoid silo decisions: Avoid making decisions in isolation; instead, centralize the tracking of GPUs and GPU related initiatives in one place.
4. Time is critical: Scalable tooling is a key to moving fast when making distribution decisions which, in turn, allows more time for innovation and learning from our experiences.
5. Efficiency feeds innovation: Efficiency paves the way for innovation by encouraging optimal resource utilization, fostering collaboration and resource sharing.
6. Embrace risk in the pursuit of innovation: Acceptable level of risk tolerance will allow to embrace the idea of 'failing fast' and maintain an environment conducive to Research and Development.
7. Transparency and confidentiality: We encourage transparency around the GPU allocation methodology through education and updates on the wiki's while applying confidentiality around sensitive information on R&D and ROI sharable with only limited stakeholders. We celebrate wins and share lessons learned broadly.
8. GPUs previously given to fleets may be recalled if other initiatives show more value. Having a GPU doesn't mean you'll get to keep it.

Project Greenland

To address the complexity of managing GPU supply and demand, Amazon launched a new project called Greenland last year.

Greenland is described as a "centralized GPU orchestration platform to share GPU capacity across teams and maximize utilization," one of the documents said.

It can track GPU usage per initiative, share idle servers, and implement "clawbacks" to reallocate chips to more urgent projects, the documents explained. The system also offers a simplified networking setup and security updates, while alerting employees and leaders to projects with low GPU usage.

This year, Amazon employees are "mandated" to go through Greenland to obtain GPU capacity for "all future demands," and the company expects this to increase efficiency by "reducing idle capacity and optimizing cluster utilization," it added.

$1 billion investment in AI-related projects

Amazon's retail business is wasting no time putting its GPUs to work. One document listed more than 160 AI-powered initiatives, including the Rufus shopping assistant and Theia product image generator.

Other AI projects in the works include, per the document:

• A vision-assisted package retrieval (VAPR) service that uses computer-vision technology to help drivers quickly identify and pick the correct packages from vans at delivery stops.
• A service that automatically pulls in data from external websites to create consistent product information.
• A new AI model that optimizes driver routing and package handling to reduce delivery times and improve efficiency.
• An improved customer service agent that uses natural language to address customer return inquiries.
• A service that automates seller fraud investigations and verifies document compliance.

Last year, Amazon estimated that AI investments by its retail business indirectly contributed $2.5 billion in operating profits, the documents showed. Those investments also resulted in approximately $670 million in variable cost savings.

It's unclear what the 2025 estimates are for those metrics. But Amazon plans to continue spending heavily on AI.

As of early this year, Amazon's retail arm anticipated about $1 billion in investments for GPU-powered AI projects. Overall, the retail division expects to spend around $5.7 billion on AWS cloud infrastructure in 2025, up from $4.5 billion in 2024, the internal documents show.

Improving capacity

Last year, Amazon's heavy slate of AI projects put pressure on its GPU supply.

Throughout the second half of 2024, Amazon's retail unit suffered a supply shortage of more than 1,000 P5 instances, AWS's cloud server that contains up to 8 Nvidia H100 GPUs, said one of the documents from December. The P5 shortage was expected to slightly improve by early this year, and turn to a surplus later in 2025, according to those December estimates.

Amazon's spokesperson told BI those estimates are now "outdated," and there's currently no GPU shortage.

AWS's in-house AI chip Trainium was also projected to satisfy the retail division's demand by the end of 2025, but "not sooner," one of the documents said.

Amazon's improving capacity aligns with Andy Jassy's remarks from February, when he said the GPU and server constraints would "relax" by the second half of this year.

But even with these efforts, there are signs that Amazon still worries about GPU supply.

A recent job listing from the Greenland team acknowledged that explosive growth in GPU demand has become this generation's defining challenge: "How do we get more GPU capacity?"

Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• AI will get cheaper, especially as chip prices come down, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.
• Jassy laid out his expectations for AI in his annual letter to Amazon shareholders on Thursday.
• Amazon has been investing in AI infrastructure, from chips to data centers.

AI is going to get a lot cheaper, especially as the price of chips comes down, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday in his annual shareholder letter.

Jassy pointed to chips as "the biggest culprit" behind the cost of AI. "Most AI to date has been built on one chip provider," Jassy wrote in an apparent reference to Nvidia.

But inference, or what AI models produce, will become more efficient in the next couple of years, Jassy wrote. Chips will also offer progressively better performance for price over time, he added.

"AI does not have to be as expensive as it is today, and it won't be in the future," Jassy wrote.

Jassy's comments echo others in the tech world who have said they expect AI to get a lot cheaper — and quickly.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in February that the cost of AI will drop by 10 times every year, for instance.

The falling cost of using AI would make it affordable for more companies to adopt, Jassy wrote on Thursday. That's potentially good news for companies like Amazon, which is investing in the infrastructure necessary to run AI, from chips to data centers.

"Reducing the cost per unit in AI will unleash AI being used as expansively as customers desire, and also lead to more overall AI spending," Jassy wrote in his letter.

Jassy compared AI's potential growth to that of Amazon Web Services. Amazon, which operates like "the world's largest startup," as Jassy said in his letter, has grown AWS in part by lowering its computing costs, which attracted more customers and grew the business, he wrote.

Here's the full text of Jassy's letter:

Dear Shareholders:

2024 was a strong year for Amazon.

Our total revenue grew 11% year-over-year ("YoY") from $575B to $638B. By segment, North America revenue increased 10% YoY from $353B to $387B, International revenue grew 9% YoY from $131B to $143B, and AWS revenue increased 19% YoY, from $91B to $108B. For perspective, just 10 years ago, AWS revenue was $4.6B; and in that same year, Amazon's total revenue was $89B.

Amazon's operating income in 2024 improved 86% YoY, from $36.9B (an operating margin of 6.4%) to $68.6B (an operating margin of 10.8%). Free Cash Flow, adjusted for equipment finance leases improved from $35.5B in 2023 to $36.2B.

Apart from the financial results, we made our customers' lives meaningfully better and easier. In our Stores business, we substantially expanded selection, continued lowering prices (independent research firm, Profitero, found Amazon the lowest-priced online U.S. Retailer for the eighth year in a row), and for the second year in a row, we shipped at record speed to our Prime members. AWS launched a slew of new infrastructure and AI services that make it even easier to build remarkable customer experiences, including our latest custom AI silicon (Trainium2), a new set of frontier foundation models in Amazon Nova, and significant expansion of available models and features in our leading Generative AI ("GenAI") services Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. Prime Video continued to offer compelling original shows, including new seasons for Fallout, Reacher, The Boys, and The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, movies like Road House, The Idea of You, and Red One, live sports like Thursday Night Football and UEFA Champions League in Europe (with the NBA and NASCAR coming in 2025), and new selection, highlighted by Apple TV+ joining Prime Video Channels. We launched a series of new Kindle devices that included a new color version, a larger Scribe option, and our fastest Paperwhites ever (the collection of which drove the highest Kindle unit sales for a single quarter in over a decade). And, we continued to add more selection, price transparency, and same day shipping for Amazon Pharmacy.

These accomplishments are a subset of what the team launched in 2024, but represent a lot of invention, hard work, and thoughtful execution across Amazon. I'm thankful for my teammates and their delivery this past year (some of which you can see in our 2024 results, others of which won't be visible for the next few years).

A Why Culture
Every year in my annual letter, I try to share insight into what makes Amazon tick. At the highest level, we're aiming to be Earth's most customer-centric company, making customers' lives better and easier every day. This is not easy to do in general, let alone year after year. In fact, it's actually quite hard, especially with the rapid rate of change in technology, customer habits, and new products from large and small companies alike. If we want to have a chance at succeeding in our mission, we have to constantly question everything around us.

We've had this long-held philosophy at Amazon about two-way and one-way door decisions. A two-way door decision is one where if you get the decision wrong, you can walk back through that door, revert to where you were, and there are few (if any) ramifications. You can make these decisions quickly and locally. A one-way door decision is one where it's quite difficult (if not impossible) to walk back through that door if you get the decision wrong, so these decisions are made more methodically. But, both of these constructs assume the door is unlocked. A lot of invention is about trying to open doors that have historically seemed bolted shut. And, over the past 30 years, we've found one of the most important keys to unlock these doors has been a simple question: "Why?"

"Why does this customer experience have to be this way?" "Why can't it be better?" "What are the constraints—why must we accept them?" "Why can't we invent around that?" "Why will it take so long to get to customers?" Why?

My Dad has told me that I was the kind of kid who kept asking why, perhaps to an annoying extent. He's also reminded me how shortly after I joined Amazon in 1997, he tried to persuade me to work somewhere more traditional (and on the east coast closer to family)—only to realize that I'd already found the perfect fit.

That's because Amazon is a Why company. We ask why, and why not, constantly. It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable. Amazon has an unusually high quotient of this WhyQ (let's call it "YQ"), and it frames the way we think about everything that we do.

Starting in 1995, we asked why can't we offer customers every in-print book?

Then, we asked, why limit ourselves to in-print—why can't we also offer every out-of-print book?

Why not offer every book, ever written, in any language—all available within 60 seconds on a device that's light and fits in the palm of your hand (Kindle)?

When we offer reviews, why must they all come from professional "experts?" Customers are great resources and will be brutally honest. Why not include customer reviews even if they sometimes dissuade a purchase?

Why not offer more than Books? What about Music, Video, Electronics, Tools, Kitchen, Apparel, Home Furnishings?

Why not practically everything?

Why should we be the only sellers of these items? Millions of third-party merchants and small sellers offer similar or unique items. Why not let customers choose the selection, price, and delivery speed they prefer from among these millions of sellers?

After struggling for a couple years to create awareness for sellers' selection, we asked ourselves why not show their selection on the same product detail pages as our first-party selection (where all the traffic was)?

Why not allow our sellers to also store items in our fulfillment network, enable those items to have fast, Prime delivery, and fulfill those items for sellers (a program called Fulfillment by Amazon)?

Why not experiment with relevant advertisements in our store to expose customers to new sellers and items (versus only what our algorithms might surface based on past purchases)?

Why does every company need their own capital-intensive datacenters and infrastructure? Why should every development team keep reinventing services like compute, storage, database, and analytics? Why should builders spend 80% of their time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting vs. their unique customer experience? Why not build a set of services (AWS) to solve that for internal and external builders?

Why do I have to buy a physical video to watch a movie? Why do I need cable or linear TV to watch amazing TV shows (Prime Video)?

Why can't I get my Prime shipping benefits on other websites than just Amazon (Buy with Prime)?

I can go on. But, you get the idea. Every one of these Whys have led to significant invention, and every one of them have made customers' lives better and easier. Some of these seem obvious now. But at the time, these were provocative questions that required curiosity, risk-taking, experimentation, and persistence to make these into success stories.

Enabling a Why Culture
If you believe having high YQ is critical to inventing for customers, how do you enable it? In my opinion, it's not solved with one mechanism. It needs to be built deeply into your culture and leadership team, and has to be fiercely protected over time if you're lucky enough to be successful. Here are a few of the strategies we employ.

Create leadership principles that set the tone. We have 16 Leadership Principles that guide our behavior. They're all integral underpinnings to our YQ, but I'll touch on three in particular:

Are Right a Lot
"Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."

When we first instituted this leadership principle, some people incorrectly assumed it meant that the best leaders were the ones whose ideas were chosen (i.e. they were right, a lot). It led to some people overly digging in and fighting for their ideas. There's nothing wrong with pushing for what you believe. But, in my experience, the best leaders want to hear others' views. They don't wilt or bristle when challenged; they're intrigued. Effective leaders change their minds when presented with new compelling information (which makes it ironic how people dismiss politicians as "flip-floppers" when they change their position). Ultimately, leaders are responsible for getting to the best answer for customers, regardless of whose original idea is chosen.

Learn and be Curious
"Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them."

In the nearly 28 years I've been at Amazon, the biggest difference in the relative growth of companies and individuals has been their aptitude to learn. At a certain point, some leaders seem to lose their thirst to learn. It's hard to know the reason in each case, but it's as if some people find it too exhausting, too time-consuming, or too threatening to not have all the answers. Regardless, the day we stop learning at Amazon is the day we risk undermining what we're capable of building in the future. People with high YQ are always curious how they can get better, become wiser, and incorporate their new knowledge into better customer experiences.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
"Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."

We don't just empower people to challenge one another, we obligate them to do so if they disagree. Questioning, asking the hard questions, forcing the discussion (versus silently thinking a mistake is being made) is necessary to getting to better answers for customers. "I told you so" has no currency at Amazon. It's also important to focus on the second part of this leadership principle: disagree and commit. While constructive debate is useful; at some point, teams need to make a decision and take action. From that point on, everybody—even those who advocated for a different solution than the one chosen—must commit to making that decision a success. That means the team goes all in—no pocket-vetoing nor hedging between other options. That's the only way we can preserve speed and confidence that if an issue is heavily debated, the team will ultimately pull together.

Create norms that support the Why. Similar to how our Leadership Principles guide our behavior, we've built norms over the years that guide how we work. Here are a few examples:

Narratives. We stopped presenting information to each other inside the company via powerpoint in 2004. Given how high level powerpoints are, we found that powerpoint was easy for the presenter to prepare, but harder for the audience to understand the substantive issues. Instead, we moved to writing narratives with a maximum of six pages in the body. Narratives are harder for the presenter (it's hard to write a thoughtful six-page document that highlights the key issues in enough detail to be crisp and clear), but much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right Why questions.

Working backwards documents. When we build services or features, before we start coding, we write Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions ("FAQ") documents. The Press Release is intended to ensure that what we're proposing building is remarkable to customers (so we don't get to launch and ask "wait, why did we think customers would find this interesting?"). And, the FAQ is designed to force ourselves to ask the hard questions about which customers will use this capability, what they'll like most, what they'll be most disappointed with, why are we drawing the launch line where we are, why is it better than current alternatives, how should we think about pricing, what pricing dimensions we recommend, and why have we made the architectural decisions we have. The Press Release and FAQ are how we work backwards from customers, and how we push ourselves to ask questions customers would if they were in these meetings.

Be together whenever possible. There are many paths that can lead to breakthrough innovation. Occasionally, a lone genius comes up with a brilliant idea, and everyone else simply executes it. While that can work, it's not how we typically operate. Amazon invention is deeply collaborative. It starts with a seed of an idea, then a group of smart, mission-driven people refine, challenge, and build on it together. And, we've found that this process is far more effective in person than remote. Of course, you can invent with everybody remote (and some cultures seem to prefer that). However, in my experience, it doesn't compare to being in the same room. The energy, the pace, the spontaneous brainstorming, the willingness for people to jump in, the way ideas evolve in real time, and the post-meeting iteration is much better when in the same room—and yields better outcomes for our customers and teams. With what's happening in AI right now, and the likelihood that every customer experience we've ever known will be reinvented, there has never been a more important time, in my opinion, to optimize to invent well.

Tolerating messy meetings. It's hard to "schedule" innovation. You can't book 60 minutes to invent Amazon Prime, or AWS, or Alexa+, or Fulfillment by Amazon, or Regionalization in our Fulfillment Network, or Project Kuiper. These inventions are borne out of somebody asking why we can't change what's possible for customers, and then they take on a life of their own, often meandering down multiple dead ends before getting to a final destination. This might bother some regimented folks. But, when we're inventing, we accept the process being beautifully imperfect.

Operate like a startup (in our case, the world's largest startup). We strive to operate like the world's largest startup. What does that mean?

First, whatever we're contemplating building has to be focused on solving a real customer problem or meaningfully improving a customer experience. Companies can get off track prioritizing technology because they're excited about the technology. Great startups are on a mission to change what's possible for customers.

Second, we have a disproportionate need for builders. These are inventors. They're people constantly dissecting customer experiences, even ones that seem pretty good today, and asking why they can't be better. They're divinely discontent (maybe annoyingly so for team members proud of what they've previously built), and never feel like the job is done.

Third, we want owners. One of the strengths of Amazon over the first 30 years is that we've hired really smart, motivated, inventive, ambitious people who have been great owners. And, that means that our teammates are constantly asking themselves, "What would I do if this was my own money?" "What would I do if I started this company and I was the majority owner?" "Hey, I know I've only been asked to own a part of this project, but I'm not sure if the other parts are being driven well—should I stick my nose into this and make sure or just trust somebody's got it?" Owners feel accountable. They care deeply about the quality and effectiveness of what they own, and view the company's mission as their mission (we want missionaries, not mercenaries). That's part of what our effort to increase the ratio of individual contributors versus managers is about. We want flatter organizations where our owners doing the work feel like they own the two-way door decisions (which are the vast majority), can move rapidly, and are fully accountable for solving the Whys of their customer experiences.

Fourth, speed disproportionately matters for every business, in every industry, at all times. It's a false binary to argue that you can move fast or deliver high standards. If you want to be fast, you can be fast, and still be high quality. We've done it for many years (though we can still be faster). Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it's a priority, reinforce it constantly, organize and remove structural barriers, and build in modular ways that enable pace. But, speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it. We have this persistent feeling, throughout the company and in every business in which we operate, that there are closing windows all around us. We operate in fiercely competitive market segments, with highly talented, well-funded, ambitious companies at every turn. Customers are always looking for something better. We spend a lot of time identifying how to unlock these experiences for them as quickly as possible, and know if we don't, somebody else will.

Another way to gain speed is to eliminate bureaucracy. There is a difference between process and bureaucracy. When you're running something at scale, you need mechanisms to deliver the right experience and constant improvement for customers. However, as companies grow and add more managers, unneeded processes get layered on that add little value. Last fall, I asked teammates across the company to send me bureaucracy examples that they were experiencing. I've received almost 1,000 of these emails, and read every single one. Builders hate bureaucracy. It slows them down, frustrates them, and keeps them from doing what they came here to do. As leaders, we don't always see the red tape buried deep in our organizations, but we can sure as heck eliminate it when we do. We've already made over 375 changes based on this feedback. We need to move fast, and we are committed to rooting out bureaucracy that ties up time and dispirits our teammates.

Fifth, you have to be scrappy. As businesses succeed and get larger, they sometimes forget how things got started. We built Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) with 13 people; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with 11 people. Managers can confuse themselves that the way to grow and get ahead is to accumulate large teams. Historically, we've had periods where we've allowed this thinking to hold sway. But, it's not the way we fundamentally think about building teams and products, and have adjusted to reflect that again. Our best leaders get the most done with the least number of resources required to do the job. They pride themselves on being lean.

Sixth, you have to be willing to take risks. This sounds easier than it is. You need clever enough people to identify worthwhile bets. And if you have these inventive, ambitious builders with high standards, they're not used to failure. They suspect external (and maybe internal) ridicule awaits them if they try something very different that doesn't work out. So, people often play it safe. But, you can't achieve something extraordinary for customers by playing "not to lose." If your Whys take you down an invention path that delivers an experience that doesn't look like what's been done before, let customer obsession be your compass. You rarely, if ever, change the world by doing the same thing as everybody else.

And finally, you have to care most about delivering compelling results for customers. It's not how charismatic you are. It's not whether you're really good at managing up or sideways. What matters is what we actually get done for customers. That's what we want to reward.

Next generation Whys
While the team and I feel quite optimistic about the progress and potential of our existing businesses, we have plenty of new Whys we're asking. Below are a few of them and some quick thoughts.

Why is AI so important? Will it really have as much impact as some claim and when?
Generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know, and enable altogether new ones about which we've only fantasized. The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance (e.g. customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc.). This is saving companies a lot of money. Increasingly, you'll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks—everything. Some of these areas are already seeing rapid progress; others are still in their infancy. But, if your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive. How soon? It won't all happen in a year or two, but, it won't take ten either. It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.

OK, I buy AI is big; but why invest this much this quickly?
Fundamentally, if your mission is to make customers' lives better and easier every day, and you believe every customer experience will be reinvented by AI, you're going to invest deeply and broadly in AI. That's why there are more than 1,000 GenAI applications being built across Amazon, aiming to meaningfully change customer experiences in shopping, coding, personal assistants, streaming video and music, advertising, healthcare, reading, and home devices, to name a few. It's also why AWS is quickly developing the key primitives (or building blocks) for AI development, such as custom silicon AI chips in Amazon Trainium to provide better price-performance on training and inference, highly flexible model-building and inference services in Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, our own frontier models in Amazon Nova to provide lower cost and latency for customers' applications, and agent creation and management capabilities.

There is also substantial capital investment required. In AWS, the faster demand grows, the more datacenters, chips, and hardware we need to procure (and AI chips are much more expensive than CPU chips). We spend this capital upfront, even though these assets are useful for many years (in the case of datacenters, for at least 15-20 years). We only start monetizing this capital investment many months after we spend the capital, and over many years—which leads to attractive long-term FCF and ROIC (as people have seen in AWS over the last several years). But in periods, like now, of unusually high demand (our AI revenue is growing at triple digit YoY percentages and represents a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate), you're deploying a lot of capital. We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know, the demand is unlike anything we've seen before, and our customers, shareholders, and business will be well-served by our investing aggressively now.

Why do chips and AI have to be this expensive for customers?
AI does not have to be as expensive as it is today, and it won't be in the future. Chips are the biggest culprit. Most AI to date has been built on one chip provider. It's pricey. Trainium should help, as our new Trainium2 chips offer 30-40% better price-performance than the current GPU-powered compute instances generally available today. While model training still accounts for a large amount of the total AI spend, inference (which are the predictions or outputs of the models) will represent the overwhelming majority of future AI cost because customers train their models periodically, but produce inferences constantly in large-scale AI applications. Inference will become another building block service, along with compute, storage, database, and others. We feel strong urgency to make inference less expensive for customers. More price-performant chips will help. But, inference will also get meaningfully more efficient in the next couple of years with improvements in model distillation, prompt caching, computing infrastructure, and model architectures. Reducing the cost per unit in AI will unleash AI being used as expansively as customers desire, and also lead to more overall AI spending. It's like what happened with AWS. Revolutionizing the cost of compute and storage happily led to lower cost per unit, and more invention, better customer experiences, and more absolute infrastructure spend.

Why have personal assistants not yet taken off? How can Alexa help?
A great personal assistant can answer virtually any question and get things done on your behalf. There have been no digital solutions that can do both yet. That is, until Alexa+ arrived. Alexa+ is not only comparably intelligent to the leading chatbots, but can take a plethora of real actions for you. She can play music, play video, move media from one of your devices to another, set alarms and timers, control your smart home, order across hundreds of millions of ecommerce items, make reservations for restaurants or Ubers, order concert tickets, alert you when your favorite artist announces a tour, find a plumber to fix your sink, and memorize whatever you've done on Amazon. This is pretty game-changing for consumers, and just the start of what Alexa+ will do. We have over 600 million Alexa devices out there today, and expect Alexa+ to play an even more vital role in the lives of these hundreds of millions of customers in the future.

Why can't we get items to customers even faster? Does it matter?
Every year, people ask whether we've reached the law of diminishing returns on speed of delivery. Our data shows this not to be the case. When we promise faster delivery times, customers complete purchases at a meaningfully higher rate and shop with us more frequently. Amazon Prime started with unlimited, free, two-day delivery for a million products; it's now grown to over 300 million items, with tens of millions available in one day (or better). An increasing number of deliveries happen same day. This speed improvement is primarily due to our regionalization redesign of our fulfillment network, our new placement algorithms, and the introduction of our innovative same-day fulfillment centers. Although we've set speed records for two consecutive years, we're still honing these innovations, and have others planned. And, don't forget Prime Air, our drones that will get items to customers inside an hour. We are not done improving speed.

Why can't people in small towns enjoy the same fast delivery speeds as people in cities?
As some other companies are abandoning small-town customers due to cost to serve, we're going the other way—we're investing to serve our rural customers even better. We've already expanded Same-Day and Overnight Delivery to dozens of smaller cities and towns across the U.S., with more coming. This expansion will provide even faster Amazon delivery speeds for many millions of customers, particularly in less densely populated areas, enabling us to deliver over a billion packages each year to customers living in 13,000 zip codes spanning 1.2 million square miles.

Related, why can't we help the hundreds of millions of people without broadband connectivity?
There are about 400-500 million households around the world, most in small, rural towns that don't have access to broadband connectivity. They can't leverage the Internet to learn, shop, do business, access entertainment, and communicate the same way people take for granted in bigger cities. This digital divide is what Project Kuiper, our low Earth orbit satellite network, aims to solve. We're just launching our first production satellites, and will ultimately have over 3,200 in orbit over the next few years. While capital-intensive to launch, we believe Kuiper will be a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.

Why does healthcare have to be so stressful?
Healthcare, especially in the U.S., is quite frustrating. It's hard to get fast appointments with primary care physicians, often harder with specialists. There's a lot of waiting around. Physicians spend only a few minutes with patients. Then, patients have to drive somewhere (often not close) to get their medications. And, when they get to the pharmacy, they're often surprised by the pricing, what's covered by their insurance, and what you can easily access that's not behind a locked shelf. Customers deserve better. It's why you see such positive customer sentiment and growth for Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, and we continue to iterate quickly on selection and transparency for Amazon Pharmacy, and physical clinic capacity for One Medical.

These are some of the Why questions we're asking ourselves right now, and I'm excited about the future inventions to come. We're not going to be bored any time soon.

When I first started working, I thought it was unfathomable that my Dad worked at the same place for 45 years. How could that be? That's so long. I used to tell my friends that would never be me. Now, with almost 28 years and counting at Amazon, I have to answer those same friends with their own Why question.

After all these years, why are you still at Amazon?

I'm obviously a Superfan, but there are several compelling parts to working at Amazon. First, I'm not sure that any company prioritizes customers as relentlessly as we do. Lots of companies say they will; few follow through. Second, it's challenging to find a company where you can make a bigger impact on the world than you can at Amazon. Third, we make significant long-term investments and bets in both inventions and people. This allows our teams to iterate on ideas, and make the right long-term decisions for customers and the company. And, I've never encountered a more intelligent, creative, ambitious, hungry, hard-working, and missionary group of teammates than we have at Amazon. In my opinion, this is a remarkable set of qualities to have at a company. And, for builders who want to change the world, and who have fire in their belly, there's no better place to be than Amazon.

We operate like the world's largest startup in large part because of our culture of Why. We don't always get everything right, and we learn and iterate like crazy. But, we're constantly choosing to prioritize customers, delivery, invention, ownership, speed, scrappiness, curiosity, and building a company that outlasts us all. It remains Day One.

Sincerely,

Andy Jassy
President and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

• Amazon faces uncertainty as tariffs disrupt forecasting and supply chain operations.
• Amazon's suppliers and sellers say there has been very little guidance.
• Amazon's stock was among the hardest hit on Thursday following Trump's tariff announcement.

The tariff mayhem is throwing Amazon into uncertain territory.

Forecasting, for example, has become nearly impossible for some teams. One of Amazon's largest supply chain units recently warned about the challenges of making its second-quarter projections due to tariffs, according to an internal email obtained by Business Insider.

The "volatility and uncertainty" from the new round of tariffs were simply too high to derive any meaningful numbers, the email said.

Amazon employees, alongside suppliers and sellers, are scrambling for answers as President Donald Trump's whipsaw trade policy roils the country's largest e-commerce retailer. On Thursday, Amazon was among the hardest-hit stocks when roughly $2.5 trillion was wiped out of the S&P500 Index over Trump's aggressive tariff plan.

Amazon has given little guidance or financial flexibility so far, according to multiple employees, suppliers, and sellers, who mostly spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press. Tension is intensifying as concerns of a prolonged trade war and potential recession loom.

Amazon's spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.

'Large risk'

The same email from Amazon's supply chain team said that the near-term impact of tariffs will ultimately be captured and reflected in a later forecast. But the exposure to tariffs and a global trade war is "a large risk" that can set back Amazon's retail business going forward, it added.

Some Amazon employees have been in direct contact with its suppliers, commonly known as first-party vendors. These companies sell their products wholesale to Amazon, which then resells them to shoppers.

These vendors said Amazon isn't willing to pay more for their products, even if the tariffs would increase the suppliers' costs. According to a March email seen by BI, an Amazon employee encourages vendors to seek further cost savings from their own manufacturers or through government subsidies.

"We understand the challenges posed by the current economic and trade environment," the email said. "However, we believe there are alternatives to direct cost increases that haven't been fully explored."

Some vendors told BI that Amazon also seeks "margin agreements" that guarantee the same margin after a vendor increases its prices. That way, Amazon would maintain its profit margins from its suppliers, even if it buys the products at a higher price.

In some cases, Amazon is pausing shipment orders from vendors to monitor the market. One shipping company recently told a vendor that "as per Amazon's request," it was holding the pick-up schedule of inventory to "mitigate the impact" of tariffs, according to an email seen by BI.

Alan Adams, president of Navazon, a vendor software company, told BI that tariff discussions with Amazon employees have been ongoing for months. He said both Amazon and the suppliers are pursuing ways to adapt to the new market conditions, but the constant policy changes make finding a long-term solution difficult.

"We are all in a wait-and-see mode with a tremendous amount of uncertainty across different categories," Adams said.

Raising prices

Trump imposed sweeping tariff increases on most countries this week. The changes are expected to increase prices across a variety of goods.

Truist Securities' Youssef Squali said the tariffs will likely have an adverse effect on e-commerce companies, including Amazon. Import costs will likely eat into their margins, though it will still take time to fully measure their impact on each individual company, he wrote in a note Friday. Amazon's stock is down roughly 10% from Wednesday.

Third-party merchants who sell on Amazon told BI they will likely have to raise their prices due to the tariffs.

Charles Chakkalo, founder of JoeyzShopping, who sells home and kitchen items, said he anticipates over 50% tariffs on his products. To counter, he will have to raise prices, while leveraging his unit volume to lower manufacturing costs.

Oscar Babarin, managing director of marketing agency Hawke Media, said a number of his clients are feeling the impact deeply. Some of them are scaling back their business, while others are more aggressively pursuing market share, he said.

However, some sellers, are excited about the elimination of the de minimis exemption that allowed tax-free shipments of Chinese imports valued at less than $800, according to Oliver Scutt, board member of Merchant AI. Those sellers expect less competition from Temu and Shein following the change, he said.

Still, most sellers and vendors said they feel helpless against the complexity of trade policies. On Thursday, as the market plunged, one supplier emailed an Amazon manager to ask for additional guidance, only to receive very little support.

"Rest assured, we are looking into it," the Amazon manager said.

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• Amazon shared Andy Jassy's top five career tips in a recent blog post.
• Jassy said people should be experimental and driven in how they approach their careers.
• Jassy said learning from mistakes and having a strong work ethic is important, too.

Build trust, find your passion, and try new stuff: These just might be some of the secrets to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's success.

In a blog post published on Friday, Amazon rounded up five of Jassy's career tips for staffers who want to build successful careers. His tips largely boil down to being experimental, driven, and open to learning.

Jassy's first piece of advice is to seek out work that builds on your passions, which will allow you to do work you find fulfilling.

"You spend a lot of your waking hours thinking about and at work, and you want to work on something that really is fulfilling to you and that you can be great at and makes you feel good about how you spend your days," Jassy said.

Next, Jassy said it's important to adopt an experimental approach to your career by trying out different fields.

"Before I got to Amazon, I had tried sportscasting and sports production, I coached a soccer team, I worked in a retail golf store, I did product management, I tried investment banking, I tried sales, I tried a lot of things," Jassy said.

Jassy's third tip is to not fear failure. Instead, he advises being self-aware and learning from mistakes.

"Every important lesson I've ever had as a professional, or in my life, frankly, have been mistakes that I've made or been a part of," Jassy said.

Jassy's fourth piece of advice for succeeding in the workplace is to have a strong work ethic and be a good team player. Position yourself as someone people can trust, he said.

Lastly, Jassy said one needs to be a "great learner" to excel.

"The truth is, if you work in an active, dynamic area, like all of us do, you should be learning all the time," Jassy said.

Jassy's tips in Amazon's blog post align with the advice he's given in the past.

Last year, Jassy told Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, during a video interview that a person's success often hinges on their attitude to work.

"Do you work hard? Are you more can do than nay saying? Do you do what you said you were going to do? Can you work on a team?" Jassy told Roslansky.

"You know, those things seem so simple, and there's so many things you can't control in your work life, but you can control your attitude," he added.

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and became CEO in 2021 when founder Jeff Bezos stepped down. He was the CEO of Amazon Web Services from 2016 to 2021.

Jassy is executing a push to keep Amazon nimble by eliminating red tape.

In September, Jassy said in a memo to staff that he wants to operate Amazon "like the world's largest startup" by empowering employees to act fast and independently.

On Tuesday, Jassy told employees during an all-hands meeting that he wanted them to "move fast and act like owners," BI reported.

"One of the strengths of Amazon over the first 29 years is that we've hired really smart, motivated, inventive, ambitious people who have been great owners," Jassy said.

"What would I do if this was my company? And by the way, it is your company. This is all of our company," he continued.

Representatives for Jassy at Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants to reduce management layers and bureaucracy.
• He told employees that building a giant team and fiefdom wouldn't help them get promoted.
• He also encouraged staff to act like owners and stay aware of industry competition.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy really wants to reduce management layers.

During a recent internal all-hands meeting, Jassy reiterated his commitment to de-layering, a move he thinks will cut bureaucracy. Amazon previously announced a plan to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of March.

At the Tuesday meeting, the CEO said Amazon is actively changing how it thinks about promotions. He stressed the best leaders are those who "get the most done with the least amount of resources required to do the job," according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.

Jassy added that "every new project shouldn't take 50 or more people to do it," and reminded employees that some of AWS's most successful products initially started with teams of about a dozen.

"The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom," Jassy said. "There's no award for having a big team. We want to be scrappy about us to do a lot more things."

Jassy's comments were in response to a question about his intention to run Amazon like "the world's largest startup." In addition to the manager shake-up, Jassy underscored the need to build a culture of speed and meritocracy.

Amazon hasn't shared how exactly it is reducing management layers. Some managers were told to increase their number of direct reports, make fewer senior hires, and cut pay for certain employees, BI previously reported.

In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said the company has now completed this process, which impacted a "relatively small subset of employees." The spokesperson added that Amazon combined teams and moved managers to individual contributor roles to reach its goal, and this "did not equate to eliminating 15% of manager roles."

"In September 2024, we shared with employees that we set a goal to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% across our organizations because it was the right time to bring us closer to customers and reinforce our culture of ownership. There are a number of ways to achieve that increase. We've now reached that goal, which we believe will allow our teams to move even faster as they innovate for customers," the spokesperson said.

Meritocracy over bureaucracy

In September, Amazon also created a "No Bureaucracy" email alias, where employees could report unnecessary processes that needed to be fixed.

Jassy said during the Tuesday meeting that he's read every single one of the over a thousand emails he's received so far and that the company has made more than 375 changes as a result.

"We are, as a team, committed to getting rid of the bureaucracy," Jassy said.

When companies grow, it's natural to put more processes in place, Jassy added. But companies often make the mistake of focusing too much on adding more people and managing them versus improving the customer experience, he said.

"It's not how charismatic you are. It's not whether you're really good at managing up or managing sideways," he said. "What matters is what we actually get done for customers. That is what we reward. It's a meritocracy."

'It is your company'

Jassy also urged employees to "move fast and act like owners."

He said big companies tend to become slow and indecisive. This is a particularly big risk for Amazon, given the intense competition it faces. Competitors include the "most technically able, most hungry" companies in the world, including startups "working seven days a week, 15 hours a day," he said.

"One of the strengths of Amazon over the first 29 years is that we've hired really smart, motivated, inventive, ambitious people who have been great owners," Jassy said. "What would I do if this was my company? And by the way, it is your company. This is all of our company."

Another point Jassy made during the meeting was to be "hyper-aware" of what's going around Amazon. That means keeping track of not just Amazon's own goals, but other technology and companies that can be inspiring, he said.

"Great companies, startups who have that real missionary zeal and succeed are always looking around," Jassy said. "When you're inventing, you need that blind faith that you're building something maybe others haven't thought of, but you got to keep checking in to make sure it's the best solution available for people."

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• Amazon quickly integrated DeepSeek AI models into Bedrock due to high demand in January.
• Amazon wants to promote its products as faster and more secure alternatives to DeepSeek.
• The cloud giant warns employees not to share confidential information with DeepSeek.

In late January, as DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the tech industry, Amazon saw a huge spike in companies requesting access to the Chinese AI model on its development tool Bedrock.

Amazon swiftly added DeepSeek to Bedrock. Some employees who spoke to Business Insider felt the approval process was unusually fast. Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy later told investors the company moved quickly to meet customer demand.

DeepSeek's sudden rise has spurred swift reactions inside Amazon. The repercussions have been felt across product updates, sales pitches, and development efforts, according to internal documents seen by BI and people familiar with the matter.

The responses show how fast-moving AI discoveries can whipsaw even the biggest and smartest technology companies. Amazon rivals, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have also been forced to respond to the DeepSeek impact.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company's strategy has always focused on providing secure access to the latest models through AWS, giving customers control over their data to customize and build generative AI applications.

"Delivering DeepSeek models is an example of that," the spokesperson added in a statement to BI. "We're extremely pleased with the feedback that we've received from the thousands of customers who have already deployed DeepSeek on AWS."

'Privacy concerns'

DeepSeek's AI models upended the tech world in January with their powerful performance and low cost. Tech stocks plunged as investors questioned US tech companies' massive spending on computing products.

For now, Amazon continues to add DeepSeek-related features. Earlier this week, the cloud giant made it easier to use DeepSeek's reasoning model on Bedrock, offering a "fully managed" service with built-in security and monitoring features. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman wrote on LinkedIn that there's been "incredible demand" for DeepSeek.

It's not just the Bedrock team scurrying to make changes. One person said that DeepSeek has sparked many new discussions across Amazon.

One particular topic has been how Amazon should position itself against DeepSeek.

AWS has encouraged employees to highlight privacy and security concerns around DeepSeek when they speak to customers, according to internal guidelines seen by BI. They should remind customers of the importance of "model choice" and pitch AWS's Nova AI models as an alternative, the document added.

The guidelines also suggest promoting Bedrock, which AWS says provides a more secure and private method of accessing AI models. With Bedrock, customer data is not shared with model providers or used to improve base models. Amazon expects most customers to use open-source versions of DeepSeek models, not those directly offered by the Chinese company, it added.

"DeepSeek's privacy policy states they collect user data and may store them on servers in China," the guidelines said. "We are aware of the privacy concerns on DeepSeek models."

Nova is faster and safer

AWS has also told employees to leverage DeepSeek's shortcomings when selling Nova.

The guidelines say Nova models are faster than DeepSeek's models, based on third-party benchmark data, and more secure given AWS's more robust "responsible AI" standards.

Nova is more comparable to DeepSeek's V3 model than the R1 reasoning model and they serve different needs, the guideline also stated. However, the V3 is a "text-only model," while Nova supports image and video understanding, the document emphasized.

AWS is now working on its own reasoning model that would directly compete with DeepSeek's R1, BI previously reported. While AWS has been developing the new model for months, DeepSeek's recent emergence added more pressure to expedite its progress, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

Efforts to study DeepSeek's technology are in the works at Amazon, and AWS wants to apply some of the training techniques DeepSeek used in its new reasoning model, some of the people added.

During last month's earnings call, Jassy said Amazon was "impressed" with a lot of DeepSeek's training methodologies. Those include "flipping the sequencing of reinforcement training" and some of its "inference optimizations," Jassy explained.

"For those of us who are building frontier models, we're all working on the same types of things and we're all learning from one another. I think you have seen and will continue to see a lot of leapfrogging between us," he said.

'Deepseek-interest' channel

On the day DeepSeek roiled the stock market in late January, Amazon employees created an internal Slack channel called "Deepseek-interest," according to a screenshot seen by BI. More than 1,300 employees joined the channel in just a few days.

One person wrote on this Slack channel that he was "surprised" there wasn't much pushback against DeepSeek given its China origin and "security concerns." Another person asked for Neuron, AWS's in-house chip development platform, to support DeepSeek models. A third person wrote about a customer complaint over errors they saw while using DeepSeek on Bedrock.

Amazon also held an internal DeepSeek learning session in late January, according to one of the Slack messages. The event covered AWS's messaging, positioning, and key differentiators versus DeepSeek.

Moving on from DeepSeek

Meanwhile, Amazon now discourages employees from using DeepSeek on their work computers, according to several people familiar with the matter. Staff now get a warning to not share confidential information with DeepSeek's app, the same message they see when using ChatGPT at work.

Perhaps in a sign of how fast things change in AI, some Amazon employees already seem to be moving on from DeepSeek to other Chinese AI offerings.

One person wrote in the internal Slack channel that AWS should start considering other China-based models, like Alibaba's Qwen.

"DeepSeek is already the past day," this person wrote. "When do we have Qwen2.5-Max?"

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• Amazon executives are skeptical about Microsoft's quantum computing breakthrough claims.
• One Amazon exec called it "next level (in BS and hype)."
• Recent quantum announcements by tech giants may be more hype than substance, other experts suggest.

Microsoft claimed a major quantum computing breakthrough last month. Amazon executives aren't buying it.

On February 19, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum processor called Majorana 1. The company said the chip uses a new type of architecture that could allow quantum computers to store way more data and perform much more complex calculations.

On the same day, Simone Severini, Amazon's head of quantum technologies, emailed CEO Andy Jassy casting doubt on Microsoft's claims, according to a copy of the email obtained by Business Insider.

Severini wrote that Microsoft's underlying scientific paper, released in Nature, "doesn't actually demonstrate" the claimed achievement and only showed that the new chip "could potentially enable future experiments."

He also noted that Microsoft has a checkered history of "several retracted papers due to scientific misconduct" in the quantum computing space, adding that some of the company's earlier research had to be withdrawn. The email was also shared with several other executives, including Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman and SVP James Hamilton.

"This seems to be a meaningful technical advancement, but it's far different from the breakthrough being portrayed in the media coverage," Severini wrote in the email.

It's also far from clear that Microsoft's architecture, which uses "topological qubits," will provide "any real performance benefit," he added.

'Next level (in BS and hype)'

In internal Slack messages, seen by BI, Amazon execs and employees were more vocal about their frustration with Microsoft's claims.

Oskar Painter, Amazon's head of quantum hardware, stressed the need to "push back on BS statements like S. Nadella's," likely in reference to the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's social media post proclaiming major advancements with the Majorana chip.

Painter, who also teaches at Caltech, said he has more positive views of Google and IBM's quantum-computing efforts. Microsoft, on the other hand, is "next level (in BS and hype)," he wrote in an internal Slack message seen by BI.

One Amazon employee joked about receiving texts from friends asking if this would "change the world," while another poked fun at tech companies using grandiose statements to promote their quantum efforts.

"Seems as if Google, IBM and Microsoft's marketing teams are making faster progress than their hardware R&D teams," this person wrote in Slack.

'Insignificant' compared to what is needed

Tech companies have been working on quantum computing for years. The hope is to one day create machines that enable significant strides in areas like drug discovery or chemical compound creation. In recent months, Amazon and Google have also unveiled new quantum chips.

But their efforts to outduel each other could generate more hype than substance, according to industry experts.

Arka Majumdar, a computer engineering professor at the University of Washington, told BI that Microsoft's technological achievements are impressive but "insignificant" compared to what is needed to create a useful quantum computer. He added Microsoft's claims appear "sensational" and "overhyped," given they haven't reached meaningful scale.

Scott Aaronson, a renowned quantum computing researcher and computer science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed out in a blog post that Microsoft's claim to have created a topological qubit "has not yet been accepted by peer review."

The peer review file of Microsoft's Nature report states that the "results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices," and the work is intended to introduce an architecture that "might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes."

In an email to BI, a Microsoft spokesperson said the Nature paper was published a year after its submission, and the company has made "tremendous progress" in that time. Microsoft plans to share additional data "in the coming weeks and months," the spokesperson added.

"Discourse and skepticism are all part of the scientific process," Microsoft's spokesperson said. "That is why we are dedicated to the continued open publication of our research, so that everyone can build on what others have discovered and learned."

Quantum timelines

Amazon and Microsoft also have differing views on the expected timeline for practical quantum usage.

Microsoft's spokesperson told BI, "Utility-scale quantum computers are just years away, not decades." Amazon's spokesperson, however, expects another couple of decades before mainstream adoption.

"While quantum computers may not be commercially viable for 10-20 years, bringing quantum computing to fruition is going to take an extraordinary effort, including sustained interest and investment across the industry starting now," Amazon's spokesperson told BI.

Chris Ballance, CEO of quantum-computing startup Oxford Ionics, told BI that Amazon's recent quantum chip announcement was equally vague with little substance. Other industry experts previously told BI that they were unsure if the technology has advanced as far as these companies claim.

Still, Ballance said the recent array of quantum news is a "good sign" for the industry, which is still in its "very early days."

"It shows that people are waking up to the value of quantum computing and the need to address it in their roadmaps," Ballance said.

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• Meta's Andrew Bosworth recently told staff to "disagree and commit" or leave the company.
• The phrase, popularized by Bezos, emphasizes quick decision-making and commitment amid disagreement.
• The philosophy dates back to the Intel CEO Andy Grove, who believed in cohesion around decisions.

In Silicon Valley, an old mantra — "disagree and commit" — is making a comeback.

Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, recently told staffers to either leave or "disagree and commit" — echoing a phrase popularized by Jeff Bezos.

While Bosworth used the phrase to present a fork in the road for Meta employees unhappy about the company's recent policy changes, Bezos has talked about it as a management philosophy.

As Amazon's CEO, he elaborated on the phrase in his 2016 shareholder letter under a section labeled "High-Velocity Decision Making." Bezos argued that the use of "disagree and commit" could "save a lot of time."

"If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there's no consensus, it's helpful to say, 'Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?'" Bezos wrote.

"By the time you're at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you'll probably get a quick yes," he added.

He argued that bosses should follow the ideology as well. Bezos recalled greenlighting an Amazon Studios original after telling his team he had concerns about its success — his team had a different perspective and wanted to move forward.

"I wrote back right away with 'I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we've ever made,'" Bezos said, adding that the decision-making would have been much slower if the team had spent time trying to convince him.

A useful phrase that echoes late Intel CEO Andy Grove's management philosophy

The concept appears to echo a management philosophy from the 1980s, when Andy Grove, known for his intense management style and visionary leadership, ran Intel. Grove, who escaped Nazi-occupied Hungary, died in 2016 at 79.

Richard S. Tedlow, Grove's biographer, told BI that while it could be "very hard" to agree with Grove, the concept of disagreeing and committing "was the essence of how he felt you should comport yourself at Intel."

"Disagree and then commit was a philosophy that you fight like cats and dogs, but once the decision is made, everybody's pulling in the same direction," Tedlow said.

While Tedlow wasn't sure whether Grove coined the phrase, he said it embodied the culture at Intel during the executive's time leading the company.

Christopher Myers, the faculty director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, used the example of a CEO acceding to a lower-level employee who's closer to a problem to show how "disagree and commit" could be beneficial.

In a 2024 interview with Lex Fridman, Bezos expanded on the philosophy. He said that companies "tend to organize hierarchically," often leaving the CEO to make the final call. The CEO might not agree with the decision — but Bezos argued that committing is better than compromising or giving in to whoever's the most stubborn.

"The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth," Bezos said, adding that "you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth."

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has since adopted the phrase, which is part of the company's leadership principles outlined on its website.

In recent years, the phrase appears to have evolved into "disagree and commit — or leave." In a 2023 internal fireside chat about Amazon's return-to-office policy, Jassy told employees it was time to "disagree and commit," adding that "it's probably not going to work out" for workers who don't do so.

Bosworth recently took a similar approach in responses to comments in an internal Meta forum. "Unless you are referring to the policy changes, in which case Mark spent quite a while talking through them, it just sounds like you don't agree," he said. "In that case, you can leave or disagree and commit."

Myers said that in its purest form, the disagree-and-commit mantra can remind organizations that productive conflict is valuable.

• Amazon Web Services growth hindered by capacity constraints in data centers, says CEO.
• Constraints stem from AI chip shortages, server components, and energy supply issues.
• Amazon plans $105 billion in 2025 capital expenditures, largely led by AI.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on Thursday that the Amazon Web Services cloud business could grow faster if not for "capacity constraints" across its data centers.

He said the shortage has been caused by difficulty procuring AI chips, server components like motherboards, and the energy to power data centers.

"It is true that we could be growing faster, if not for some of the constraints on capacity," Jassy said during Thursday's call with analysts.

On Thursday, AWS reported a 19% increase in sales for the fourth quarter at $28.8 billion, which was slightly below street estimates. Amazon's stock dropped roughly 4% in after-hours as the company gave lower-than-anticipated first-quarter guidance.

Jassy's remarks echo recent statements made by cloud rivals Microsoft and Google. Microsoft's CFO Amy Hood said last week that the company is in "a pretty constrained capacity place" when it comes to meeting demand, while Google's leadership said on Tuesday that it ended 2024 with "more (AI) demand than capacity."

Jassy said on Thursday that he expects the constraints to "relax" in the second half of 2025, adding it is "hard to complain" when AWS's AI business is on pace to generate "multi-billion" dollars in annual sales.

Amazon expects AI demand to continue growing. For 2025, the company forecast roughly $105 billion in capital expenditures, mostly in data centers, after spending a record $26.3 billion during the fourth-quarter.

Jassy said AWS doesn't make that kind of financial commitment unless there are "significant signals of demand."

"When AWS is expanding its capex, particularly what we think is one of these once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunities like AI represents, I think it's actually quite a good sign, medium to long term for the AWS business," Jassy said.

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• Amazon could face a significant impact from Donald Trump's new tariffs on Chinese imports.
• Morgan Stanley estimates Amazon to be the most-exposed among e-commerce companies the bank covers.
• A large chunk of Amazon's third-party sellers are also China-based.

Amazon could be one of the hardest-hit e-commerce retailers by new tariffs on imports from China.

Morgan Stanley wrote in a note on Monday that roughly 25% of the cost of products directly sold by Amazon come from China, exposing them to the new tariffs. Those items sold by Amazon, called first-party merchandise, account for a little less than half of all products sold on Amazon. Third-party merchants sell the rest through Amazon's marketplace.

Amazon's exposure to the tariffs is higher than other e-commerce companies covered by Morgan Stanley. The note estimates that the average exposure to China among those e-commerce companies is a little over 10%. Fashion retailer Revolve had the second-highest exposure among these companies at 22%. Peloton, Etsy, and Figs are estimated to have less than 3% of their products from China.

"AMZN's 1P business & RVLV have the highest exposure while PTON, ETSY & FIGS are at the low end," Morgan Stanley wrote in the note.

US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on imports from some countries including China over the weekend. That included a 10% tariff on goods from China. He also took aim at a loophole in US customs law, known as the de minimis exemption, that let importers avoid duty and tax on direct shipments from China worth less than $800.

Almost half of Amazon's 10,000 largest third-party sellers are China-based, according to Marketplace Pulse. That means the new tariffs could affect an even bigger share of products sold on Amazon.

Amazon's spokesperson declined to comment.

Morgan Stanley's note on Monday also shared the methodology it used to estimate the China exposure rate. In Amazon's case, it estimates roughly two-thirds of all first-party inventory costs are for non-grocery and consumer products, of which 40% originate from China.

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• Amazon has restarted the green card application process for foreign workers.
• Amazon paused PERM filings in 2023-2024 due to "labor market conditions."
• The change may signal an improving job market, analysts say.

Amazon has resumed the green card application process for foreign workers, a sign of an improving job market.

In an internal note from late 2024, obtained by Business Insider, Amazon told employees that it planned to reopen PERM processing on January 6, 2025. Amazon had suspended all new PERM filings in 2023 and throughout 2024, BI previously reported.

PERM is part of the US Labor Department's permanent labor certification process and is typically the first step towards getting a green card for a foreign worker. The goal is to prove hiring foreign workers won't impact US job seekers's opportunities, wages, or working conditions.

The note didn't explain why Amazon is resuming the PERM process. But, the change potentially reflects Amazon's outlook for a more competitive job market. It also follows Trump's campaign vow to give green cards to every foreign graduate of US colleges.

"We evaluate our PERM program based on market analysis and have been planning to reopen it for the last 9 months," Amazon's spokesperson said in an email to BI.

'Rebound' from the layoffs

Amazon has been making major job cuts since late 2022, laying off at least 27,000 employees. Just last week, Amazon let go about 200 people from its Fashion and Fitness group, BI reported.

Resuming PERM filings indicate Amazon sees a possible "rebound" in the job market, according to Richard Herman, a Cleveland-based immigration lawyer and founder of the Herman Legal Group.

Herman said some companies previously suspended green card filings due to widespread layoffs and the high cost and time of processing PERMs with the Labor Department.

With PERM, companies have to demonstrate that laid-off employees are not qualified for the jobs intended for foreign workers while also notifying US workers laid off within the past 6 months about the anticipated PERM filing. That costs a lot of money and time.

"If employers are reconsidering getting back into the PERM game, it's because their cost/benefit analysis suggests labor market changes favor a more competitive market in some occupations, justifying the costs/time invested in PERM," Herman said.

Tech companies are still laying off employees and applying more stringent performance reviews. But the hiring trend may improve.

HR software maker Karat said in a 2024 report that average hiring targets for software engineer roles among US tech companies were up 12% year-over-year. Stripe laid off 300 employees earlier this week but said it plans to grow its total head count by roughly 1,000 this year, BI previously reported.

"Tech in the Bay Area is definitely hiring more, and so they have a positive view of what's ahead," Bill Hing, an immigration law professor at the University of San Francisco told BI.

Trump effect

President Donald Trump may be another factor.

During his presidential campaign, Trump mentioned that he would like to give green cards to every foreign graduate of US colleges as part of a plan to attract more skilled immigrants.

That has led to a clash between the Elon Musk-led pro-Trump tech leaders and the hardcore MAGA base over the legal immigration of skilled workers.

While it's possible Trump will commit to his proposal, he hasn't publicly addressed it since then, and some believe he could change his mind. Trump's campaign, in fact, clarified last year that his proposal would only apply to the "most thoroughly" vetted foreign students.

Jennifer Gordon, a labor and immigration law professor at Fordham University, told BI that companies may be trying to anticipate Trump's unpredictable behavior in advance.

Given Trump's past hard-line stance against immigration, Gordon said it's possible the new administration could issue a policy pausing skilled labor immigration applications in the future.

"If I was a tech company, I wouldn't be fully confident that he will follow through," Gordon said.

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Contact the reporter, Eugene Kim, via the encrypted-messaging apps Signal or Telegram (+1-650-942-3061) or email ([email protected]). Reach out using a nonwork device. Check out Business Insider's source guide for other tips on sharing information securely.