Deep Dive: A Primer on Mag7 - Amazon
In 2016, when Amazon was a $300B company, I called it a multi-trillion-dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight.
In 2016, when Amazon was a $300B company, I called it a multi-trillion-dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight.
The core insight was that Amazon wasn’t just an online retailer. It was quietly building the foundational infrastructure of the internet and the modern economy. AWS would become a tax on innovation, Prime would make it functionally irresponsible for anyone not to subscribe, and the company’s habit of turning internal costs into scalable profit engines would let it compound faster than anyone expected.
10 years later, that playbook has played out almost line for line. Amazon is now a $2.35T company, with its dominance driven by turning nearly every line item in its P&L into a profit engine across compute, logistics, and content.
AWS’s next chapter is being written in AI, with over $100B in capex, with the majority going to data center investments in 2025 alone and a push into custom training and inference chips.
I’ve been studying Amazon for nearly two decades, so my team took my original thesis and created a primer on Amazon with fresh data and analysis. The result is a full breakdown of how Amazon turned its internal infrastructure into the backbone of the modern economy, how AWS quietly became the world’s most profitable utility, and how the company’s reinvestment model is positioning it to dominate the AI era.
In the end, we hope this work gives a clear, durable framework for understanding where Amazon stands today and how its system of infrastructure, logistics, and compute continues to compound.
Hope you enjoy reading.
Chamath