May 5, 2026
WHEN: Today, Monday, May 4, 2026
WHERE: CNBC’s “Mad Money”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with Amazon President & CEO Andy Jassy on CNBC’s “Mad Money” (M-F, 6PM-7PM ET) today, Monday, May 4.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
PART I
JIM CRAMER: To celebrate 250 years of American innovation, we're on the ground with the companies pushing things forward, highlighting the names helping build what comes next. And that's why we're here at Amazon's headquarters. The tech giant reported a really fabulous quarter last week, driven by their booming Amazon Web Services business for cloud infrastructure and A.I. While this is still one of the largest retailers in the world, AWS alone has an annual revenue run rate of $150 billion. And they keep adding more to the story on a pretty regular basis, from setting up their own low-Earth orbit satellites for Internet service to offering their supply chain services to anyone who wants it. It's at the heart of the computer-driven economy. So let's check in with the man behind all these plans, Andy Jassy, the president and CEO of Amazon. Andy, thank you so much for taking us here and welcome back to “Mad Money.”
ANDY JASSY: It's great to be here with you.
CRAMER: All right, so you broke some news today and I think it's kind of emblematic of what Amazon does. You've come up with something that is better for people, better for businesses, makes everything cheaper, run faster, and it's about logistics. Sounds like a little bit like Amazon Web Services, when you were running that.
JASSY: Well, it has some similarities. I mean, today, most companies don't think it's a good idea to run their own infrastructure technology themselves, when they can put it in the cloud. And I think, over time, you might find that most companies don't feel like it's a good idea to have to run their own logistics, when they can use their supply chain services. And so if you think about what we had to do as a retail business, we had to get really good at being able to move products from manufacturers to upstream storage warehouses to the actual fulfillment centers, where you actually do the fulfillment, to allowing people to sell in multiple marketplaces, but have one inventory pool, to the last mile delivery. We had to get good at all those to scale our retail business. We just said it makes so much sense to expose these services to companies of all sizes. And, you know, today, we announced that 3M and Procter & Gamble and Lands' End and American Eagle were all using the services. But it may end up being the case that so many companies small and mid-sized get the most benefit, because to not have to build out their own logistics network is a big deal.
CRAMER: Well, when I hear, I, it's terrific about Procter and I know you want to send west to east for American Eagle, but I always think about the small businessman or the middle who have to normally go to a distributor. Maybe they can go direct and the distributor won't take the 30 percent. It is just a fantastic opportunity for someone who is just starting a business.
JASSY: Yes and today, to try and compile a supply chain for any size business, but particularly a small business that doesn't want to have to build out all those capabilities themselves, it's time-consuming and expensive. And so, if we can provide those components at a very cost-competitive rate like we do and at a very high quality, it's very compelling.
CRAMER: All right, now I want to go to your letter, which was, look, I've told you at times when I thought you were like too soul-searching. This was the opposite. This was pure offense. And I know you're a sports fan. And I'm a sports fan. I want to win with defense, but offense is exciting. "Progression at Amazon is not exactly a straight line." What does that mean?
JASSY: Well, I think, I mean, I love the band The Beths, and they have very clever lyrics and album titles. And this last album, "Straight Line Was a Lie," really spoke to me because most big inflections don't follow this one linear line. It would be so much easier if they followed this straight linear line, but they don't. And it means that you have to acknowledge that. It means that you're going to go through, they're going to be disruption. You're going to try ideas that don't work and you have to go back to the starting line. If there's something important enough, you're going to have to think about, do I only want to take one shot at finding the answer, or am I going to take multiple parallel shots, because it's so important, I have to make sure I find a winning solution here. And I think that, when you believe that there is a particular inflection that is disproportionately important, like A.I. is, as an example, you want to bet big. Even if it means that you may over-rotate a little bit, these inflections are so big and so impactful on the future of what customer experiences are and your company that you want to make sure that you've gone all in on it.
CRAMER: Well, this is important, because, by the way, you used the term reinvent four times, reimagine three times. And I was thinking, well, isn't that what you're doing right now when you spend $200 billion and you actually believe it's going to pay off?
JASSY: Yes, well, I mean, to me, the really big capital expenditure bet that we're making is because we believe that A.I. is the biggest technology transformation in our lifetimes. It's going to reinvent every single customer experience we know and altogether new ones we never imagined. And if you look at the pace that things are growing, just, I used in the letter the example of the first three, after the first three years of AWS, we thought we were growing really fast and we were about $56 million in revenue. And after the first three years of this inflection of A.I. or this incarnation of A.I., our run rate's over $15 billion, 260 times what it was the first three years of AWS. And we thought we were growing fast with AWS. So when you have shifts that are this momentous, you want to make sure that you invest in such a way that you can pursue the opportunity as broadly for your customers as possible, as well as for, I think, not just our customers who benefit, but our shareholders. And the company as a whole will be a very different company five to 10 years from now because we're betting big like this than it would otherwise be if we were conservative.
CRAMER: I think there's so many people, pundits, whatever, who say they're spending so much without any real hope of regaining it. Not only do you disagree with that, but you talk about a return in a couple of years and then you're talking about, 30 years, the return will be unbelievable. What are they missing?
JASSY: Well, I think that it's, people sometimes forget the way the cash cycle works in a business like AWS. So the way it works is that we have to lay out capital and cash in advance of when we can monetize it. This is for land for the data centers, power, the buildings themselves, the hardware, the chips, the networking gear. You have to lay all that out in advance. Some of it is about six months in advance, and a bunch of it is two years in advance. And so that means that, the faster we grow in AWS, the more capital we have to lay out in the short term, which will create challenges in your free cash flow in the short term. But these assets are many-year useful life assets. On the networking and the hardware side, it's about six years. On the data center side, it's 30-plus-year useful life assets. And so you get to monetize those assets over a long period of time, so that, when your revenue growth starts to catch up with the capital expenditure growth, you actually end up really liking the operating margin, the free cash flow and the ROIC. And so we have lived this movie once before in the first wave of AWS, where we had this same type of curve where we were spending so much CapEx in the short term, and then we all really liked the free cash flow and the ROIC a few years later. And I think the same story is going to play out, except with just much larger revenue and free cash flow downstream.
CRAMER: OK, now in terms of inflections, I saw two. One was food and the other was semis. And your description of these in the letter was just mind-blowing. One of the reasons why I think the stock went up so much wasn't just the quarter, but you explained how these could be big semiconductors. Do people know how big that business is for you?
JASSY: Well, we're trying to help people be more aware of what that business looks like for us. And it's kind of remarkable how fast our chips business is growing. It's, you know, last quarter, we announced it's over a $20 billion annual run rate business. And that may understate really the size of it. If you, if we actually took all the chips that we're going to produce in 2026 and we sold them to AWS and to third parties in the form of racks, like most of the leading chip companies do, that business will go up more like a $50 billion annual run rate business. And it's growing triple digit percentages year over year. The two largest A.I. labs in the world in OpenAI and Anthropic have made multiyear, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium, which is our A.I. silicon. You probably saw the Meta just announced that they're going to consume tens of millions of cores of Graviton, which is our CPU chip. Today, 98 percent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers use Graviton in a very expansive way. And so we, the business itself, I think it's great for customers because it gives customers choice, and it gives them advantage price performance, but it also is going to be good for us, long term, because, at our scale, like, think about what we're investing in capital expenditure right now. I expect that there will be investment opportunities for a long time. At scale, it will save us tens of billions of dollars of CapEx a year and hundreds of basis points and operating margin, which is a big deal for us too.
CRAMER: When you say choice, it's important people understand. I know you can say I'm too close to it, but that Nvidia is often the alternative. And you remain an excellent customer of Nvidia too.
JASSY: Yes, we have a deep partnership with Nvidia. We will for as long as I can foresee. We have an immense amount of respect for them. And we're going to always have customers that want to run Nvidia on AWS, and we will continue to make AWS the best place to run Nvidia. And that's true. And we will also have a very good chips business. And that's because customers want choice. It's true in every technology. It was true in databases. It's true in analytics. It's true in frontier models and it's true in chips. And so we will be able to do both successfully, I believe.
CRAMER: And be a top five chip company.
JASSY: I think we're well on our way.
CRAMER: Yes. OK. Well, we're going to take a break here and we're going to come back, but there's a lot to talk about, also going to get a little philosophical, if you don't mind, when we come back.
PART II
CRAMER: Before the break, I spoke with Andy Jassy, the president and CEO of Amazon, because this is one of the most important companies in the world. There was more than we could cover in a single segment, so let's get right back into it. Andy, I want people to understand the ethos of Amazon. Maybe the best way to do it is to say something that you said in your letter. "While other companies have been backing away from rural customers, we've been running to them." I think this is very much of what's going on in terms of lowering price, in terms of getting it so everybody can have stuff as fast as possible. And I just want you to speak to it, because it's not what everyone, it's, no one is doing what you're doing. Talk about that.
JASSY: Yes. Well, it's more expensive to try to service rural customers, because it's, your investments aren't able to be amortized across as dense a population. So, it's harder sometimes to serve rural customers. The reality is, there is a digital divide in this country and in the world right now. And if you look at, to me, if you live in a rural area, the fact that you can't get items via e-commerce in less than three days, I think it's unfair and I think it's a bad customer experience. And so we've decided, we invested $4 billion to build out a last mile delivery network for rural customers. If you look at the amount of items that we're getting to them now same day, it's more than double already this year, year to date, versus last year. And we're still in the process of building out all the delivery stations. And so we're going to be able to get items to customers in rural areas so much faster, inside a day or two, which is a very different customer experience than what you could do before. I think the same is true around just the connectivity they have, where there is a real digital divide. And the things that you and I are used to doing every day that we take for granted, doing business online or education online or shopping or entertainment, those things, you can't do in a lot of rural communities. They're without broadband connectivity. There are billions of people around the world who don't have broadband connectivity. And so if we're able to make that, if we're able to give them that connectivity with—
CRAMER: With satellites.
JASSY: We're building this low-Earth orbit satellite called Amazon Leo. That completely changes what's possible for people in rural areas. So, yes, it's a meaningful investment, but the way we think about investments is, we're trying to make customers' lives better and easier every day. And then we try to have a long time horizon how we think about it. And we believe, over a long period of time, if we do right by rural customers, we make it much faster for them to get their items, they will shop with us much more frequently. If we make it easy for them to get connectivity, it's going to be, their lives will change and what they're able to do, where they live will change, and that will benefit us too.
CRAMER: Well, the ethos includes democratization. I think it's really important. It also includes something we can talk about when you're the second largest grocer. And it bothers me tremendously when I see the CPI number and it's up and I hear that the place I shop, Amazon, the prices are down. How do you reconcile this? And how do you keep prices, your prices overall are down versus last year.
JASSY: Yes. Yes.
CRAMER: We have a bout of inflation. Everyone's telling me it's going to be, send it straight skyrocketed. How do you do it?
JASSY: Well, we have an expression that we've used for almost a couple decades at Amazon, that it's pretty easy to lower prices, but it's much harder to be able to afford to lower prices. And it's really true. And so we spend, if you were in our meetings, we spend a disproportionate amount of time, A, inventing, and then, B, trying to figure out how we can lower our costs to serve inside our fulfillment network so that we can continue to keep prices low for customers. So that takes the form of things like we've completely re-architected our regional network in the U.S. so we get items, we're able to store items closer to end users so they travel shorter distances, they get there quicker, and it's less expensive to serve customers that way. And we've completely re-architected our inbound network, again, to try and get items to more fulfillment centers closer to the end customer. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to allow customers to add to their orders. We have a lot of customers who have items coming almost every day to them.
CRAMER: Right.
JASSY: And so we have this feature add to order, where you can just add an item to an existing outstanding order, which seems easy enough from a U.I. perspective. But think about the logistics of an order that you're already processing and then being able to get that item in the same order. And so the work we do to get more units in each box, it's better for customers because they don't have to open as many packages and have environmental waste. And it's just a much better, faster experience. And it happens to be more cost-effective for us too.
CRAMER: Now, you're also doing some great things in medical, including prescriptions, same-day One Medical. I have used that. It's great. I think that the thing that has really tripped up most Americans and has caused most bankruptcies is health care. Is there any chance that one day I can buy a health care insurance policy with you?
JASSY: Well, we're not focused on that part of it right now, Jim. But I happen to agree with you. We spend a lot of energy here thinking about just the health care experience around the world, but particularly in the U.S. is, it's very challenging.
CRAMER: Right.
JASSY: It's very frustrating. And so we really started with the area that was closest to what we do, which is really pharmacy. And I think, if you look at that pharmacy experience over the last couple of years, it's such a good experience for people. To be able to get your pharmaceutical items same day in thousands of cities like you can, it is a game changer to be able to get your drugs that you need to use that way. And then I think, if you look at primary care, I think our grandkids are not going to believe that the way we used to do it was we'd make an appointment a month in advance, drive 20 minutes to the doctor, park, wait in the reception for 20 minutes, they'd show you into a room, you would wait for the doctor for 20 minutes and then they'd see you for five, and then you drive 20 more minutes to the pharmacy.
CRAMER: Right.
JASSY: Like, that experience is really, it's broken. It's not going to be the case. And One Medical has really an amazing digital interface where you can do virtual chats or you can do video interviews or meetings. And if you need to see somebody in a physical location, we have them in lots of cities. And I think the other thing that's really interesting is that, over time, I do believe that there are a lot of questions that people have that either don't ask or they wait too long because it takes, it's hard to get into a medical practitioner. And the fact that you're going to be able to do that through A.I., if you look at our Health A.I. offering, which is really an amazing A.I. offering, which you can connect all your medical records to it and you can ask questions of your own health with your health history and mind. People are taking advantage of that and using it so much more than we even imagined. And it's still early. So—
CRAMER: But can, you can't make money on that.
JASSY: Over time, what's going to happen is, what I believe is, first of all, we can decide downstream whether or not there's subscriptions that come along with that. But I do think it will make people want to be part of One Medical over a longer period of time. I do think people will come in for visits. You can either have a subscription or come in for an individual visit. I do think people will probably do their pharmacy shopping with us over time if we're being useful to them generally in their medical questions they have. So I think it's very early in the model, but I, again, we're just trying to make customers' lives easier and better every day. And we have found business models out of that as we have done so.
CRAMER: In the meantime, I know that, in the news, we're constantly hearing about what Anthropic is doing and what OpenAI is doing. You have close relations with both. Now, some of your deals are up front, but then you have to hope things work out in the back before you get, the rest is paid by you. It sounds like you're more hard money and they're more soft money. Are you confident that they can pay for what, they can hold up their end?
JASSY: I think that those two companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are unbelievable stories. I mean, the fact that they're both reportedly over $30 billion in revenue at this stage of their evolution, it's mind-blowing. I mean, it's, we were talking about earlier about how fast some of these businesses grow; $30 billion annual run rate in a few years is unbelievable. And I still think that so many people are thinking small with respect to what's going to be the case in A.I. We are so early in this. And so I think, look, I mean, every company, we have a lot of confidence that we have built a pretty large A.I. business and we're still early days. So we believe we're building a very, very large A.I. business that's transformational. But I also think there are going to be multiple successful companies. I think those two are going to be two of them.
CRAMER: Now, if you didn't spend this money, the likelihood of failure is increased dramatically, don't you think?
JASSY: If we didn't spend the money investing in our own A.I.? I just think you would, if you don't find ways to help customers take advantage of the technology that's going to change their customers' experiences and their businesses, you may not fail on your own, at least quickly, but you will be failing every day, and you may not realize it. I mean, if you don't find ways to be relevant and to help people get to that next wave, you're just not as relevant to customers. And so every conversation we have with any company starts with A.I. People are so excited about what's possible there. And it's, even there, as we have talked about, I can't believe how fast A.I. is growing, but it's still relatively early days in A.I. But I do think the fact that we are in the middle of so many companies' transformations and being able to use A.I. is great for them and it's good for us too.
CRAMER: Now, I think a lot of people think that there has to be winner take all, that loser has nothing. I hear you on A.I. It sounds like it's big enough for everybody. I wonder whether satellite's big enough for everybody. You have got Starlink. You have got you. Why wouldn't that be a situation where, oh, geez, we didn't have the horses, they sent up more satellites than us, there's no room?
JASSY: Well, if you accept for a second that there are billions of people around the world with no broadband connectivity and there are many, many thousands of companies and government entities that want visibility into those assets where they can't get them, there's going to be more than one successful company. I mean, there are going to be multiple. Now, I think, when we get our constellation up, and we have about 300 satellites that we have launched with 20 more launches coming this year and 30 more launches coming next year, but when we have our constellation up, there really going to only be two companies with this leading-edge technology up there. And I think we have some advantages that we can bring to bear. I think, first, the performance of Leo will be advantaged. It'll be about two times better downlink, which is taking the data down, and about six times better uplink, which is uploading the data, than the other option out there. I think we will be lower-priced, which obviously matters to the customers that we're serving. And then if you're a company or a government entity, you want to take that data off the low-Earth orbit satellite and you want to store it in the cloud, you want to do analytics on it, you want to do A.I. And then the fact that our Leo works seamlessly with the leading cloud provider in the world is very compelling to commercial entities.
CRAMER: Don't forget, that's the A.I. using the data, absolutely.
JASSY: Yes.
CRAMER: Now, you love sports, entertainment too. You're trying to reinvent that, whether it be what you're doing with the, with golf, what you're doing obviously with football. I think it's interesting in terms of reinventing. You had this Wondery. I thought it was pretty good. And I'm a big Eagle Kelce fan, not as much of a chief Kelce fan, but you're reinventing that too, right? It just felt like it's not the right format. Let's have a new format?
JASSY: You know, every single one of these areas that we all, that seem stable to people—
CRAMER: Right.
JASSY: Are really not stable. They change all the time. And if you're not learning and you're not inventing, you're starting to unwind, whether you realize it or not. And it's, we saw that in media that streaming would be a medium that was very different from what linear was. And we started investing in it many, many years ago. And it's pretty, we're kind of amazed at how fast it's growing. You know, the business, the economics of the business has gotten much better over the last several years. And I think the combination of producing increasingly better content—
CRAMER: "Hail Mary"
JASSY: "Project Hail Mary" over $615 million at the box office, it's really, have you seen the movie yet, by the way?
CRAMER: No, no. I have been busy working on this interview.
JASSY: It's so, I would advise you, as soon as the interview is over, to go see it. It's really one of the best movies I have seen in many years. It's really good. And shows like "Fallout" and "The Boys" and "Reacher" and "Cross" and "Young Sherlock," I mean, we, I think the shows continue to get better and better. And live sports has been a big deal for us, and the NFL, the NBA, NASCAR, Champions League, UEFA, the Masters. And if you look at what we do in live sports, we're not just trying to roll out the same playbook that they have been running in linear for a long time. We're trying to leverage the medium. And then we're trying to use analytics and A.I. to tell a different story and give fans a different perspective. And I think that's been really successful. And the last thing I'd say is that we have also taken an approach where it's not just our content. We think we have amazing content in Prime Video, but we have really deep partnerships with HBO and Max and Paramount and Peacock and Fox and Apple, where people can come and find all the content they want. And that's also very compelling when you sit down with your family and you think about what you're going to watch that night.
CRAMER: Well, I need like seven hours with just the initiatives that you yourself have brought to this company. But they're telling me to wrap. I wish they didn't. That's Andy Jassy. He's president and CEO of Amazon. Andy, thank you so much.
JASSY: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
For more information contact:
Stephanie Hirlemann
CNBC
