“People sometimes forget the way the cash cycle works in a business like AWS,” Jassy said. “So the way it works is that we have to lay out capital and cash in advance of when we can monetize it. This is for land for the data centers, power, the buildings themselves, the hardware, the chips, networking gear. You have to lay all that out in advance. Some of it is about six months in advance and a bunch of it is two years in advance.”
