AWS Capacity Sold Out to 2028 as Power Becomes the Limit

Amazon Web Services has sold most of its cloud capacity for 2027 and a substantial part of 2028, chief executive Andy Jassy said on an Andreessen Horowitz podcast published on 24 October. He described 2026 capacity as effectively sold out and said only a limited pool is held back for on-demand instances, EC2 and the Bedrock inference service.

Amazon plans roughly USD 220 billion of capital expenditure in 2026, about USD 600 million a day, and Jassy indicated the figure could rise. He defended the spend on two grounds: customers are exceeding their commitments, and servers and networking gear are ordered only a few months ahead of installation, so Amazon can slow hardware purchases if demand softens.

The consequence is visible in cash flow. Amazon's trailing twelve-month free cash flow fell to negative USD 7.6 billion by the end of the second quarter, from positive USD 18.2 billion a year earlier, driven by a USD 66.1 billion year-on-year jump in property and equipment purchases. Internal documents cited in press reports show Amazon took delivery of about USD 5 billion of Nvidia GB300 racks in August alone, with roughly USD 3 billion a month to follow, sometimes paying before the host data centre had the power to switch the equipment on.

Those idle systems, described in the industry as dark GPUs, mark a shift in what constrains AI build-outs. For two years the bottleneck was accelerator supply. It is now electrical capacity: transformers, switchgear, busway, high-voltage cabling, cooling distribution and the grid interconnection queue. Long-lead electrical equipment can take 18 to 30 months, which is longer than the lead time on the servers themselves.

Jassy also positioned custom silicon as the cost lever, saying Trainium offers 30 to 40 percent better price-performance than comparable accelerators, with more than USD 225 billion in future revenue commitments tied to Trainium, including agreements with Anthropic and OpenAI. Cheaper inference per token raises unit volumes, which increases demand for power stages, memory and interconnect rather than reducing it.

Buyers building or expanding capacity should sequence electrical and thermal procurement before compute, and qualify parts that survive higher ambient temperatures in dense racks. YouHuYou stocks board-level power and monitoring parts for these builds, including the INA238 85V power monitor and TPS546D24A 40A PMBus converter in our catalogue.