Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and first tried sportscasting, with stints at Fox TV and as a production assistant at ABC. He graduated cum laude in government from Harvard College, where he was advertising manager of The Harvard Crimson. Before business school he spent five years working, as a project manager at a collectibles company, MBI, and then on a company he started with an MBI colleague and later closed. He then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Jassy joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997, helped run its first marketing team and later its compact disc business. He then became Jeff Bezos's first technical adviser, or "shadow", going with him to meetings and discussing possible new businesses. In 2003 the two came up with the idea for Amazon Web Services, which launched in 2006 with Jassy leading its original team of 57. In 2015 he helped lead the purchase of Annapurna Labs, an Israeli chip company whose technology became part of Amazon's own data-center chips, and in 2016 he became AWS's chief executive.
Bezos named Jassy his successor in January 2021, and he became Amazon's CEO on July 5, 2021. His first years brought cost cuts, corporate layoffs, a return-to-office policy and the closing or scaling back of some projects and store efforts. He has since put AI at the center of Amazon's plans, through AWS and Amazon-designed chips such as Trainium. In February 2026 OpenAI expanded its $38 billion AWS agreement by $100 billion over eight years, and in April 2026 Anthropic committed to spend more than $100 billion over ten years on AWS.
In July Jassy raised Amazon's 2026 cash capital spending outlook to about $220 billion from about $200 billion, tying the increase to memory prices and warning of "free cash flow headwinds" until the new data centers start earning. He has put Amazon's annualized revenue from its own chips at roughly $20 billion, and told investors that 350 million shoppers used Amazon's own shopping agent over the past year and spend 40% more per order.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
Amazon