Amazon Q1 Earnings: AWS Grows 28% to $37.6B as Trainium Custom Silicon Bet Pays Off
Stratechery·medium signal
Ben Thompson's Stratechery analysis of Amazon's earnings argues that the market's shift from training to inference and agents means Amazon's Trainium custom silicon bet is paying off. AWS grew 28% year-over-year to ~$37.6B, fueled by enterprise AI infrastructure demand. Thompson notes the irony: Amazon invested in custom chips while others focused on NVIDIA GPU access, and the inference-heavy agent era may favor exactly this approach.