Today, I’m talking with Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. 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 CEOs will decide what to change and what to keep going after they’ve settled into their role. Links: There’s no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky | Decoder Amazon's AWS to invest $11 bln in Georgia to boost AI infrastructure | Reuters Netflix’s Ted Sarandos responds to Jake Paul-Mike Tyson glitches | THR The furious contest to unseat Nvidia as king of AI chips | NYT Amazon’s moonshot plan to rival Nvidia in AI chips | Bloomberg Amazon invests another $4 billion in Anthropic | The Verge Why Netflix never goes down | The Verge Sam Altman lowers the bar for AGI | The Verge Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24102212 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Welcome to a new year. We're starting 2025 off with a good one. Today, I'm talking with Matt Garment, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. Matt's actually the new CEO. He just took over last June.
You might recall that we had his predecessor, Adam Selepski, on the show just over a year ago. That makes this episode terrific decoder bait, since I love hearing how new CEOs will decide what to change and what to keep going after they've settled into their role. And Matt has a really interesting perspective for that kind of conversation, since he's been at Amazon for 20 years.
He started as an intern and was AWS's original product manager. He's now the third CEO of that division in just five years, and I really wanted to understand both his broad view of AWS and where it sits inside the cloud computing industry, which he had a pivotal role in creating.
You'll hear Matt say that most companies are still barely in the cloud, and the 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 PM he was from the start, only now with the broad view from the CEO chair.
But just acquiring new customers isn't really the game anymore. Like every cloud provider, Amazon is reorienting its entire infrastructure for the 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.
In fact, after Matt and I had this conversation, the company announced an $11 billion investment to expand its data center operations in Georgia.
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