Building the Cloud for an Agentic World | AWS CEO Matt Garman

In 2005, Matt Garman was a business school intern at what was then an internal Amazon project called AWS. His assignment: figure out who the service would be most useful for. The answer was startups. Nearly two decades later, Garman is CEO of AWS, a business approaching $170 billion in annual revenue, and the calculus around startups has changed dramatically. Today, those two-person teams arrive with $200 million in funding and a billion-dollar valuation, and their first ask is often for GPUs. In a conversation with a16z’s Ragu Raghuram, Garman walked through the massive infrastructure buildout underway—$220 billion in CapEx for 2026 alone—and how AI is reshaping not just the cloud’s customers, but the cloud itself.

The New Startup: Bigger Ambition, Same Need for Depth

The startups AWS serves today are fundamentally different from the ones that built the early cloud. They start larger, with more capital and more expensive ideas—training a foundation model is not the same as iterating on a mobile app. But Garman emphasized that some things haven’t changed. These companies still need an architecture that scales, proper security and IAM setups, and a platform that works for more than just three employees. That, he argued, is why many choose AWS over a “neo cloud” provider: they need the depth of services from day one, even if they don’t need all of it immediately.