Amazon plans to spend $100B this year to capture once in a lifetime opportunity | Hacker News Reader

Amazon plans to spend $100B this year to capture once in a lifetime opportunity

cnbc.com

9 pointsjarsin6 comments

Bit of a misleading headline. They were already spending $83B last year and are just increasing to $100B.

Still an unimaginable amount of money to be throwing around I guess.

I’m genuinely curious how these companies are going to get a ROI?

Have you checked the Balance sheet? These companies are basically money printers.

Money printers have special status in economics, they don't have to worry about printing cause its always someone else who pays the price for any unintended consequences.

Google - Platform Economy externalities.

They make money from their core income streams like ads or hosting for AWS. People pay them money for these services because doing so helps those companies make money.

What about AI, do they expect to sell that much AI compute to other companies to justify the large capex sums? That’s what I’m curious about. Where is this demand going to come from?

Platform Economics is very different from how firms worked in the past. People are still waking up to it.

Their signature feature is they are able to squeeze both the buyer and the seller. To whatever extent they want. Thats the key point. No one else has a say.

It only works once you become large enough where both buyer and seller have no other great options. At that stage, you basically control what in traditional economics is called the money supply (ie who owns the printers and decisions on how much will be printed).

Just like large enough Banks historically could exploit both the depositor and borrower. Until they all got regulated after causing never ending chaos.

So the goal becomes - be the largest.

And to be the largest you have to kill competition. To kill competition you have to control the price(undercut every one - make things free), control labor pool (jack up salaries/perks of the best), govts policy (lobbying budget), influence what customers want (marketing spend/bid out the competition in ad auctions etc).

The capex is all about signalling to everyone we are ready to grab land on this new continent. Join our army or get fucked.

c-suites receive bonuses based on stock prices rather than roi, while investors make investment decisions based on a companys' capex instead of business

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