The Verge's Nilay Patel sits down with Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), to discuss his vision for the company's future, the impact of generative AI on cloud computing, and how AWS is preparing for the next generation of technology.
Today, I’m talking with Matt Garman , the CEO of Amazon Web Services , or AWS . Matt took over as CEO last June — you might recall that we had his predecessor, Adam Selipsky, on the show just over a year ago. That makes this episode terrific Decoder bait, since I love hearing how new CEO s decide what to change and what to keep once they’ve settled into their role.
Matt has a really interesting perspective for that kind of conversation since he’s been at AWS for 20 years — he started at Amazon as an intern and was AWS’s original product manager. He’s now the third CEO in just five years, and I really wanted to understand his broad view of both AWS and where it sits inside an industry that he had a pivotal role in creating. --- Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here! --- You’ll hear Matt say that most companies are still barely in the cloud, and that opportunity remains massive for AWS, even though it’s been the market leader for years. If you’re a product manager or an aspiring product manager, you’ll catch Matt talking about these things exactly like the product manager he was from the start, only now with a broad view from the CEO chair. But just acquiring new customers isn’t the game any longer: like every cloud provider, Amazon is reorienting its entire computing infrastructure for a world of generative AI. That includes more than $8 billion in funding for Anthropic, a huge push to build its own AI chips to compete with Nvidia, and even nuclear power investments as the energy demand for AI continues to grow. After Matt and I talked before the holidays, AWS announced an $11 billion investment to expand its data center operations in Georgia. Matt’s perspective on AI as a technology and a business is refreshingly distinct from his peers, including those more incentivized to hype up the capabilities of AI models and chatbots. I really pushed Matt about Sam Altman’s claim that we’re close to AGI and on the precipice of machines that can do tasks any human could do. I also wanted to know when any of this is going to start returning — or even justifying — the tens of billions of dollars of investments going into it. His answers on both subjects were pretty candid, and it’s clear Matt and Amazon are far more focused on how AI technology turns into real products and services that customers want to use and less about what Matt calls “puffery in the press.” One note before we start — we recorded this episode just before the holidays, so I asked Matt about Netflix, one of AWS’s biggest customers, and whether it would hold up while streaming live events, especially the NFL games it streamed on Christmas. Turns out, Netflix did just fine with those, but the answers here were pretty interesting. Matt still checks in on his big customers, even as CEO. Okay, AWS CEO Matt Garman. Here we go. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Matt Garman, you’re the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me. I am very excited to talk to you. You’re like a perfect Decoder guest. You are, I believe, the first product manager at AWS, you started as an intern and now you’re the CEO. We have a lot of listeners who want to be on that journey, so there’s lots to talk to you about just in that. You’re also the new CEO. We had your predecessor, Adam Selipsky, on the show just a little over a year ago. You’re about six months on the job now. So, there’s a lot of Decoder stuff in there — how you’re changing the organization and how you’re thinking about it. And then, obviously, we’re going to talk about AI. It’s going to happen. I hope you’re ready for it. I’m ready for it. Shoot, fire away. I’m happy to go wherever you want. All right. But I actually want to start with a very hot-button, deeply controversial topic. Are you ready? Great. Fire away. Okay, it’s Jake Paul. I want to start with Jake Paul. My understanding is Netflix is the prototypical AWS customer, right? They started on AWS, they made a big bet on AWS. They’re still the customer, right? They haven’t left AWS? Yeah, Netflix is a great customer of ours. Absolutely. They just had the live stream of Jake Paul fighting Mike Tyson. You can think anything you want about those two men fighting each other. I was hoping Mike would win, honestly. So was I. I think most were, but that’s okay. It was fun to see him out there. You’ve just set off a million more conspiracy theories about this fight. Anyhow, I told you it was controversial. All right, but the stream was pretty glitchy. I think everybody agrees on that. When I watched it, it degraded to 360p at some point for me. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was just on stage at a conference. Netflix said the demand is 108 million people globally, and here’s what Ted said about that stream: “We were stressing the limits of the internet itself that night,
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