Amazon.com (

In the letter wrapping up 2024, Jassy laid out the company’s guiding principles, such as its attitudes toward leadership and its mission to become “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”

The CEO noted efforts Amazon was taking to better serve its customer base, such as expanding fast delivery to rural towns and targeting new shoppers through the launch of its Project Kuiper satellite network. That is intended to provide broadband connectivity to millions of households.

Jassy also made forecasts about generative AI, saying it would “reinvent virtually every customer experience we know, and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized.” Beyond productivity-boosting measures, the CEO expects the technology to reinvent entire industries, from medicine to robotics.

At its core, Jassy’s enthusiasm seems to stem from his desire for Amazon to remain neck-and-neck with rivals as they ramp up their AI capabilities.

“If your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models…you will not be competitive,” he wrote. “It won’t all happen in a year or two, but, it won’t take ten either. It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.”

The CEO defended Amazon’s significant capital investment in data centers, chips, and hardware, saying customers and shareholders alike would be “well-served by our investing aggressively now.”

Jassy also appeared to nod to Nvidia’s (

Amazon is developing its own answer to Nvidia with a family of custom silicon chips called Amazon Trainium. In conjunction with Amazon’s model-building and inference services, this should “reduce the cost per unit in AI,” Jassy said.

The CEO sees inference, or the predictions and outputs the models generate, representing the overwhelming majority of future AI costs. That is “because customers train their models periodically, but produce inferences constantly in large-scale AI applications.”

He expects inference to become a so-called building block service in the near future, along with computing, storage, and databases.

Shares of Amazon were down 6.2% at $179.18 on Thursday. The S&P 500 (

The company’s largest e-commerce peer, Walmart (

Also on Thursday, Piper Sandler (