Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Speaks with CNBC’s Becky Quick on "Squawk Box"

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Category: Business/Financial News

Published on Tuesday, 20 January 2026 12:04

Written by Squawk Box

CNBC's Becky Quick sat down with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today, Tuesday, January 20 from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they discussed the upcoming challenges, AI, tariffs, and consumer spending.

BECKY QUICK: Earlier today, I sat down with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as he settles into the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. This year, people are thinking about lots of things but top of mind for many of us, including one of the world's largest retailers, is pricing pressure on consumers amid the Trump administration's tariff agenda.

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Video clip with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/01/20/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-consumers-are-trying-trade-down-in-price-wherever-they-can.html 

ANDY JASSY: Consumers have been pretty resilient. They continue to spend. They continue to shop. I think that wherever they can, they are trying to trade down in price. They are looking for bargains wherever they can find bargains. I see people a little bit more hesitant on the higher priced discretionary items. We have improved our speed of delivery so much that we have so many more people buying everyday essentials from us. It's amazing how fast that business is growing for us. You know, I think that we'll have to see what happens on tariffs.

You know, we did a lot of pre-buying in the early part of 2025 to enable us to try and keep prices as low as possible for customers. And a lot of our third-party sellers did a lot of forward-staging in our fulfillment network for the same reasons. And that supply has run out, you know, in in the fall. And so, you know, you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items. And you see some sellers are deciding that they're passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices. Some are deciding that they'll absorb it to drive demand, and some are doing something in between. And so, I think you're starting to see more of that impact. And we have so many items. We have hundreds of millions of items, and we have two million sellers, many of whom are willing to pursue different strategies and how they price that, you know, Amazon's consumers overall, I think have fared well. But, you know, we'll have to see what happens in 2026.

QUICK: What do you do once you run out of those strategies, like you said, like buying a head, trying to do some of these things? Are there other levers that you can use to keep prices down?

JASSY: Well, as much as we can, we're trying to work with our distribution partners and our selling partners to try to keep prices as low as possible for consumers. That is our focus. I mean, it has always been our focus, but especially in times of more uncertain economies or when there's changes in trade, our priority is try to figure out how to keep prices as low as possible. At a certain point, because retail is as you know, retail is a mid-single digit operating margin business, if people's costs go up by 10 percent, there aren't a lot of places to absorb it. And so, we're going to do everything we can to work with our selling partners to make prices as low as possible for consumers. But you don't have endless options.

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QUICK: Let's talk a little bit about the jobs picture, because you did make some news last summer when you talked about how AI is going to be something that you think will eventually lead to fewer jobs at Amazon. That's a little different than the take we heard from Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan, who said that if JP Morgan is successful, he thinks they'll have more employees years from now, but they'll be redeployed in different arenas. Have you thought any more about that? Because when you did scale back with some of the employees, you said it was not because of AI.

JASSY: Yeah, it wasn't. It was really – it was what we were talking about earlier. It was really around culture and being able to move quickly and have ownership. I think what I said was I've, you know, in the next couple few years, I could see or having fewer people than we had before. Some of that, you know, a lot of that will be just our continuing to allow ourselves to move quickly as it's important culturally and speed-wise.

But I do think that jobs are going to be impacted by what's happening with AI over time. They're not in a significant way yet, but I think you'll see that if you just think about how AI and agents will enable you to do coding and customer service and research and analytics. You know, even just the idea of doing spreadsheets the way we've done them in the past, I think those will be pretty different. And so, I don't think that wipes out all those jobs, but I think we'll still have plenty of people in those roles, and those people will start their jobs each task they pursue at a higher, more advanced starting point. All the work that we used to all have to do before we could get to actually the thinking work, a lot of that will be done by AI.

So, we'll still have people who will be able to invent quicker and more easily. But I do think that you won't need as many people in all those jobs that we've thrown humans at for the last 20 years. That said, you know, I do believe we're going to have a lot – we're hiring a lot of people now in AI and automation and robotics. And, you know, our low earth orbit satellite that we're building in health care. So, we're going to have a lot of people in other businesses we're pursuing, and they're going to be brand new jobs that we haven't thought of. I mean, 15 years ago, there weren't jobs like cloud architect, you know, I mean, those didn't exist. And whenever you go through any big technology transformation, you find new jobs. I think the same is going to be true here, medium to long term.

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QUICK: We also spoke about semiconductor chips and the underlying infrastructure for all that artificial intelligence and compute. About five years ago, Amazon began building its own custom silicon chips called Trainium. That was to supplement Amazon's chips from Nvidia.

Video clip with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/01/20/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-on-ai-the-cost-of-inference-has-to-come-down.html.

JASSY: We have a deep relationship with Nvidia. We will for as far as I can foresee, but it is undeniable that customers want better price performance. And if customers are going to be able to roll out AI as expansively as we believe they want to and they should, the cost of inference has to come down. And so that's why we pursued Trainium.

Our Trainium2 chip is about 40 percent more price performant than the other leading GPUs. It's fully subscribed. It's a multibillion-dollar business as you talked about. Anthropic is building their next version of Claude on top of hundreds of thousands of our Trainium2 chips. We just released our third version of Trainium, which is 40 percent more price performant than Trainium2, which was already more price performant than other things out there. And I just think that if you want to allow customers to have lower prices for inference, which we do, and if you're building a big inference business like we are and you want to have reasonable margins, if you're not pursuing your own custom AI silicon, you're going to be structurally disadvantaged.

QUICK: Now, the deal that you have with OpenAI – or this has been reported that you were going to take a $10 billion or larger stake with them – they recently signed with you, I think, a couple of months ago, to take $38 billion in AWS usage that they're going to be using, too. We've been watching from the outside. There's so many more deals that are happening. Some of these are called circular deals. It doesn't look like that's what you guys are involved in. But what do you think about the activity that is taking place? The deals that are taking place right now? Is this just a reflection of the demand that's out there, or do you feel like some of these things are circular?

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JASSY: It is so unprecedented how much compute is being consumed right now. You just have to only look at how much, you know, how many, how much power is needed, how many data centers are being built. There is – the AI labs are consuming gobs and gobs of compute right now. And so, those AI labs believe they have opportunities if they train models very expansively to keep changing the intelligence of these models.

So, they need a lot of compute, but they need money for the compute. And so, they're trying to find ways to fund that compute. And I'd say a lot of the companies who provide that compute want to be, you know, want to serve those customers and then have opportunities to also invest in those companies, as those companies are looking to find ways to fund what they're doing. And I think those companies are impressive companies. So, I think when you look at a company like Anthropic, a company like OpenAI, I mean, these are unusual companies who've been building amazing models for 10-plus years and are reshaping the way people use applications. And so, I just think it's a function of the time where tons of compute are being asked for, they need ways to fund it. Companies have opportunities to invest in companies. Those companies are impressive companies and you're just seeing some of that. But I don't know if that will continue or not.

QUICK: Do you think it ends well?

JASSY: I think it could end well. I mean, I'm saying anytime you make substantial investments, if you look at the history of, of M&A and investments, not all of them are successful. And the hit rate is pretty variable. So, I think whether the investments end well or not, we'll have to see. But, you know, I do think the companies that we're talking about just in the last few minutes are impressive companies.

QUICK: OpenAI, for instance, I think they've signed deals to build out $1.4 trillion in infrastructure just in the last several months. That's pretty ambitious. Do you think it's realistic based on the demand you see?

JASSY: Well, it is ambitious. I agree with you. And I would say that they are ambitious. And I think they're ambitious and they're forward thinking. And I know that they believe they need quite a bit of compute to train the models the way they believe changes what's possible. And, you know, I don't know the details of all those deals. Sometimes when I get a chance to look at them, you know, I have a harder time making sense of them all. And I just don't know which ones are guaranteed to spend those amounts and which are options to spend those amounts. But I know that the companies believe they need that much compute.

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QUICK: Yeah. Let's talk about data centers, because that's something that you guys are also on the forefront. You just signed a deal with Rio Tinto to lock up more of the copper that they're taking out of the ground. It's not just copper. It's electricity. It's all these things that there's a huge rising demand. Do we have the ability to meet that demand? And what else are you doing to kind of make sure you're getting it?

JASSY: Well, we have not had the – power has been short, you know, in the U.S. around the world. There is a power shortage. I think that it is better than it was 18 months ago and still not as plentiful as we all need. I mean, we're – I think everyone would tell you, well, it's better than 18 months ago. We still could be fulfilling more demand if we had more capacity.

And so, we have tried every which way we can to work with different communities and different municipalities to – and different technology providers to enable more power. We've done unique things on the nuclear side. We've invested in some SMR capabilities. We have been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for the last five years. You know, wherever we, you know, we have an initiative with water where we give back more water than we take in all the communities in which we operate. And so, we're doing everything we possibly can to help try to enable more power. And you know, we want to do it. We don't expect other people to pay for us. We expect to fund the power that we need. And we create a lot of good jobs in the communities in which we're building a lot of data centers. And we intend to continue to do so.

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QUICK: When you say you don't expect other people to pay for it, that's been an issue that President Trump has kind of been talking about writ large. He is kind of pushing back on a lot of companies to make sure that consumers aren't paying more for this. What do you guys do on that on that level?

JASSY: We spend so much money on power, Becky. I mean, it's a – we're spending a lot of money in infrastructure. We have always paid our own way. We've always expected to pay our own way.

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