Jeff Bezos has said Amazon’s custom chip business is “lining up to be our next pillar”, alongside the retail, streaming and cloud divisions of the world’s largest company by revenue, as the group prepares to spend about $200 billion in capital in 2026, most of it on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, told Fortune that the chips division, which includes the Trainium and Graviton processors, would be the “foundation” of that investment.

“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and Amazon Web Services. What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar,” Bezos said.

The $200 billion forms part of wider spending across the “hyperscaler” technology groups that is expected to exceed $700 billion this year. Those figures have fed concerns about an industry bubble.

Technology companies are developing their own processors to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s AI chips. A new Amazon chip, Trainium4, is expected to be launched next year.

Bezos was speaking about Amazon’s race to catch up with AI rivals, having been described by one influential Wall Street analyst last year as “in last place in AI”.

He said the company’s success in Marketplace retail, media through Prime Video and cloud computing through Amazon Web Services, which had $129 billion of revenue in 2025, came down to being “customer-obsessed”.

“A lot of companies will tell you they’re customer-obsessed, but they’re really competitor-obsessed,” Bezos said. “You can’t be customer-obsessed unless you love inventing … You have to do new things. And Amazon is culturally very good at both of those things.”

“If we ever stop obsessing over customers, if we ever stop inventing, if we start making short-term trades,” he said, “we could probably coast for a while, but we would lose.”

Andy Jassy, who formerly ran AWS, took over from Bezos as chief executive in 2021. Fortune quoted Jassy as saying that AI will change “every customer experience that we know today and invent a whole host of new ones”.

“I do think we’re living in a world where … the key to the compute is often the chips,” Jassy said. “The growth in AI has been so significant, but we have a chips business that we built over the last decade here that is growing very quickly.”

Jassy said in April that AWS’s AI revenue run rate exceeded $15 billion, defending the level of investment. “We’re not investing … on a hunch. Of the AWS capex we expect to spend in 2026, much of which will be monetised in 2027-2028, we already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it,” he said.

It was disclosed at the same time that the custom chips business has an annualised revenue run rate of more than $20 billion, double the $10 billion reported alongside fourth-quarter results.

Jassy has suggested Amazon could eventually sell its chips to outside customers. Google struck a deal last October to supply Anthropic, the creator of Claude, with one million of its custom AI chips, worth tens of billions of dollars.

Bezos’s comments came amid a cautious mood across global markets towards AI chip stocks, on concerns about corporate spending on the technology and lower-cost Chinese competition. South Korea’s technology-heavy Kospi index dropped more than 10 per cent on Tuesday and Japan’s Nikkei fell 4 per cent.

Amazon, along with Meta, Apple and Microsoft, is due to report earnings later this week. Nvidia shares fell 5 per cent overnight after the Wall Street Journal reported the chipmaker was in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI as part of a data centre project. Some investors say deals of that kind mean Nvidia is guaranteeing the loans that pay for its own revenue rather than driving sales through organic demand.

Bezos, 62, also described Amazon’s growth from a garage start-up selling books online in 1995. “You could not at that time have predicted the magnitude of change that would occur, and anybody who did predict that magnitude of change would probably have been quickly institutionalised and sent to the mental hospital,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been credible or believable.”

He also spoke about Prometheus, his AI start-up reportedly valued at more than $40 billion, which is said to be creating AI tools to help engineers manufacture products more rapidly.

“If you take a step back, all civilisational wealth is driven by invention,” Bezos said, adding: “We have an endless set of things to invent.”