WSS: Amazon continues to innovate amid aggressive growth; India sees uptick in development activity
A busy week saw a lot of activity around Amazon and the AWS cloud infrastructure platform. CEO Andy Jassy provided some valuable data points and perspectives on the business in his annual letter to shareholders, building on data points disclosed in the 4Q25 reporting period. Jassy reiterated an optimistic and positive outlook, pointing to the continued top-line revenue growth and stating confidently that growth could be materially faster if AWS could build out enough supply. To that end, AWS is aggressively procuring land, energy and colocation inventory, while committing to $200b in CapEx spending in 2026. In his letter, Jassy also mentioned how the proprietary silicon business at AWS continues to make progress and is now generating ~$20b in ARR and growing at triple-digit percentage rates. AWS continues to push innovation when it comes to data centre infrastructure. Media outlets have started to report on a very interesting internal initiative underway at AWS called Project Houdini that is aimed at changing the way AWS builds and deploys data centres. Not surprisingly, time-to-market is top of mind at AWS and the initiative is geared at accelerating the data centre building process by pre-assembling the building blocks in an off-site factory-like process. AWS is focusing in on what it can control. Land and energy constraints are what they are and are an ongoing challenge. Alternative energy sources are still nascent and in development. AWS is investing and innovating here as well. But the market keeps moving and AWS knows that what it can control now is the speed at which it develops and builds data centres once the raw resources are ready to go. By bringing in modular elements into the build process, AWS is speeding things up, while also driving operating efficiency and performance benefits. AWS also continues to drive business from its relationship with Anthropic. Anthropic committed to a ten-year cloud infrastructure spend over $100b and this will equate to an estimated 5GW of capacity. Amazon also upped its investment in Anthropic, which sat at around $8b, but just added an additional $5b with options for further investments based on performance levels.
The large deals continue to happen, with investments in operating infrastructure providers also being made. Jane Street both invested in CoreWeave and committed to $6b in cloud infrastructure spend. Jane Street has global reach and it is customers like these that are eventually going to drive CoreWeave to set up infrastructure locations in other regions around the world.
The past week was notable for the amount of activity we tracked coming out of the Mumbai market and India in general. AirTrunk entered the market through the merger and acquisition of Blackstone-backed sister company Lumina CloudInfra, giving it capacity in Mumbai and raw resources in significant markets like Hyderabad and Chennai. There were a number of capital raises and projects kicking off in Mumbai. On the self-build side, AWS is targeting new capacity in Navi Mumbai to support its large colocation-based data centre footprint. Mumbai remains a strong colocation market, but self-builds are emerging to complement these deployments given the overall scale of demand. On the colocation side, Princeton Digital Group started the MU2 build in Mumbai, Equinix expanded capacity at MB3 and Pi Data Centers is targeting an expansion here as well. New operating platform Zerra DC is looking at the market and secured capital for its own Navi Mumbai project.
Finally, the week saw more movement in the silicon space and AMD expanded its collaboration with South Korean cloud provider NAVER Cloud. NAVER and AMD are collaborating on a major build in Sejong, South Korea and NAVER will deploy a full range of AMD’s portfolio across both CPUs and its latest generation of GPUs. AMD is seeing the importance of building a go-to-market channel through cloud infrastructure providers (something NVIDIA is further ahead on clearly), and on the AI model side, Anthropic is doing the same. It recently committed to investing $100m to build out a partner network to help enterprises and other end users with deploying and using AI technology. AI continues to drive innovation and development across the supporting infrastructure ecosystem.
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