Jeff Bezos Gives Amazon Update After Bankruptcy Report

Jeff Bezos might not be the CEO of Amazon anymore, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t involved in the business. Bezos remains the company’s Executive Chair and still owns a significant number of shares in the company he founded. Which is why people still pay attention when he offers updates on the company.

In a new interview with Fortune, Bezos revealed that Amazon’s custom chip business is on track to become one of its most durable businesses. He even placed it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company.

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

The company has made a renewed push to design its own chips to be used for artificial intelligence, which has proven to be successful as demand for AI computing soars and Nvidia’s processors cannot keep up with demand. There have been concerns about the so-called “AI bubble,” but so far the investment seems to be paying off for the company.

Amazon’s investment comes through Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip startup it acquired in 2015, which now develops its own AI chips under the Trainium and Inferentia brands. The chips have been marketed as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers.

The company disclosed revenue for its data center chips for the first time earlier this year, and the chips have grown to a combined annual run rate of more than $20 billion.

Bezos’ pillar discussion comes from a 2014 letter to shareholders, where he described four characteristics of a “dreamy” business: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time — with the potential to endure for decades.”

AWS, Marketplace, and Prime are considered the first three pillars. Now, it seems like chips is the fourth one.

This ironically comes after a grim prediction from Bezos from 2018 has resurfaced. At the time, he predicted the company would one day go bankrupt. “I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt,” Bezos said, according to an audio of the all-hands meeting held at the time, obtained by CNBC. “If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”

Back then, he had a plan for how to delay the inevitable: “obsess over customers.”

“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end,” Bezos continued. “We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”