Andrew R. Jassy (born January 13, 1968) is an American business executive who has been the president and chief executive officer of Amazon since July 2021, succeeding founder Jeff Bezos, who remains executive chairman. Jassy founded and led Amazon Web Services (AWS) from its inception and served as its CEO from April 2016 until July 2021.
Jassy has been a central figure in Amazon's expansion into cloud computing and, more recently, its aggressive push into artificial intelligence (AI). Under his leadership, AWS has become a dominant provider of cloud infrastructure and AI services, including custom chips like AWS Trainium.
Early Life and Education
Jassy was born to Margery and Everett L. Jassy of Scarsdale, New York. He is of Jewish Hungarian ancestry. His father was a senior partner in the corporate law firm Dewey Ballantine in New York City and chaired the firm's management committee. Jassy grew up in Scarsdale and attended Scarsdale High School, where he played varsity soccer and tennis.
He graduated cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in government, where he served as advertising manager of The Harvard Crimson. In 1989, he wrote in The Crimson that the newspaper should continue to publish advertisements from Eastern Air Lines despite an ongoing labor dispute. He later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Career at Amazon and AWS
After graduating from college, Jassy worked for five years as a project manager at MBI, a collectibles company, and then co-founded a startup that closed. He joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997. Early in his Amazon career, he helped run the company's first marketing team and later its compact disc business. He subsequently served as Jeff Bezos's first technical adviser, or 'shadow', a role in which he accompanied Bezos to meetings and discussed potential business opportunities.
In 2003, Jassy and Bezos conceived the idea for a cloud computing platform that became Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006. Jassy headed AWS and its original team of 57 people. In 2015, he and Amazon executive James Hamilton helped lead Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs, an Israeli semiconductor company whose technology became part of Amazon's effort to design its own data-center chips. In 2016, Jassy was promoted from senior vice president to CEO of AWS. That year, his compensation was $36.6 million.
In 2017, Jassy was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also served on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), established in 2018, which issued its final report in March 2021.
CEO of Amazon
In January 2021, Bezos designated Jassy as his successor, and the transition occurred on July 5, 2021. During his first years as CEO, Jassy oversaw cost reductions and a reassessment of Amazon's pandemic-era expansion, including corporate layoffs, a return-to-office policy, and the closure or scaling back of some projects and physical-store initiatives.
As CEO, Jassy received a ten-year pay package totaling $212.7 million, mostly in stock vesting over a decade. He held more than 2.160 million common shares of Amazon.com and was estimated to have a net worth of almost $500 million as of January 2025. In April 2025, Amazon's proxy statement disclosed that Jassy received total compensation of $40.1 million in 2024.
Jassy has emphasized Amazon's focus on AI, particularly through AWS infrastructure, generative AI services, and Amazon-designed chips such as Trainium. Amazon announced plans to spend more than $75 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, with most directed toward AWS and generative AI. In his 2025 shareholder letter, Jassy wrote that Amazon expected approximately $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, supported in part by customer commitments for AWS capacity.
Under Jassy, Amazon expanded partnerships with major AI companies. In February 2026, Amazon and OpenAI announced an expansion of their existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years, including OpenAI's commitment to use approximately 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity. In April 2026, Amazon and Anthropic announced an expanded collaboration under which Anthropic committed to spend more than $100 billion over ten years on AWS technologies, while Amazon agreed to invest $5 billion immediately and up to $20 billion more in Anthropic, in addition to its earlier $8 billion investment.
Jassy is a member of The Business Council.
Personal Life
In 1997, Jassy married Elana Rochelle Caplan, a fashion designer for Eddie Bauer and graduate of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. Their wedding was officiated by New York reform Rabbi James Brandt, a cousin of Elana. Both their fathers were senior partners at Dewey Ballantine. The couple has two children.
They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle in a 10,000-square-foot house purchased in 2009 for $3.1 million. In October 2020, it was reported that Jassy had bought a $6.7 million, 5,500-square-foot house in Santa Monica.
Jassy serves on the Trust of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the Board of Trustees for Rainier Scholars, and as chair of Rainier Prep's board of directors.
Awards and Honors
In 2016, Jassy was named Person of the Year by the Financial Times. In 2025, Time magazine included him in its TIME100 AI list, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.