Amazon Web Services began as an internal idea. Andy Jassy spent years turning it into the dominant cloud platform and the division that pays for most of what Amazon does elsewhere. In 2021 he took Jeff Bezos's job.

AWS changed the industry by making computing something you rent rather than something you buy and rack yourself. Startups could launch on a credit card; enterprises could stop running data centres. Having built that made him the obvious successor.

He built the business that quietly funded Amazon's ambitions. Then he inherited the whole thing.

What he inherited is enormous and messy — retail, logistics, devices, advertising, cloud — and it had just been through a pandemic expansion that left costs everywhere. Much of his tenure so far has been narrowing focus and taking those costs back out.

The job now is holding growth across all of it while defending the AWS lead in a cloud and AI market that has become genuinely competitive. His background suits the fight exactly. The scale of it is the part nobody can be prepared for.

Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, New York, studied government at Harvard and, after a short spell in sports marketing, took a Harvard MBA. He joined Amazon in 1997, shortly before its stock-market listing, and later spent about eighteen months as Jeff Bezos's technical adviser, a shadowing role that put him in the room for most of the company's important decisions.

AWS launched its first major services, S3 storage and EC2 computing, in 2006, with Jassy leading the team, and he ran the unit for fifteen years. By the time he became Amazon's chief executive in July 2021, AWS was producing more than half of the company's operating profit.

His tenure began with retrenchment. Amazon cut about 27,000 corporate jobs across 2022 and 2023, closed or paused warehouse projects built during the pandemic boom, and wound down several experimental businesses. He has since pushed the company towards generative AI, through its investment in Anthropic, its own Trainium chips and the rebuilt Alexa+ assistant launched in 2025.