AWS $169B Run Rate, ‘Favorable’ $220B Investment And AI Enterprise Vision A Win For Partners: Caylent Execs

Caylent’s top executives take a deep dive into AWS earnings results, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s strategy and why AWS is in prime position to win the AI arms race.

AI channel standout Caylent is bullish about Amazon Web Services’ future after the cloud leader generated a record $42.2 billion in sales with massive AI adoption expected ahead as Amazon increases its CapEx spending $220 billion in 2026.

Last week, Amazon said it will increase CapEx spending to $220 billion this year, up from its initial estimated spending plans of $200 billion in 2026.

Caylent’s Randall Hunt (pictured) said AWS increasing its CapEx spending by $20 billion, alongside reporting trailing 12-month free cash flow of negative $7.6 billion, is a very bold move.

“That’s not a company hedging, that’s a company funding demand it already has rather than rationing it,” said Hunt, chief technology officer of the AWS Premium Partner Caylent.

“It’s a real capital cycle,” he said. “Data centers depreciate over 30-plus years. Servers and networking gear break even in under three years and last five to six. And most AI capacity right now is contracted for at least five. That [$220 billion] is a front-loaded pain for a return curve that’s very favorable once it clears breakeven.”

‘The Largest Absolute Segment’ For AI Is Still Ahead, Says CEO

During Amazon’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said the AI adoption curve looks like a barbell shape right now.

On one end of the barbell is massive compute consumption by frontier labs and breakout applications such as Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI ChatGPT, Jassy said, while the other end is early enterprise production applications that drive employee productivity or cost savings.

“In the middle of the barbell is all of the current enterprise production workloads, some of which are using inference in a pervasive way, but most of which aren’t. That is going to change very significantly over time. In my opinion, that will be the largest absolute segment, the existing production workloads in the enterprise and new businesses and workloads that startups build too,” Jassy said.

Caylent’s Hunt agreed that the market is still in the early stages of how much AI demand there’s going to eventually be.

"Jassy’s framing is exactly right, and it matches what we’re seeing,” Hunt said. “AWS’ own billion-dollar investment in forward-deployed engineering tells you why that middle hasn’t scaled yet: the friction is getting from a pilot to something actually running in production, faster.”

Why AWS Forward Deployed Engineers Are A Boom For AI And Caylent

Last month, AWS unveiled its new Forward Deployed Engineering organization, which will embed thousands of experts with customers to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions.

Caylent CEO Val Henderson said both AWS forward deployed engineering teams as well as Caylent’s own AWS and Anthropic consulting and engineering practice are helping fill in critical AI gaps for customers.

“Our engineers work embedded inside the customer’s environment rather than advising from the outside, which is how you actually move a customer into that middle of the barbell instead of leaving them stuck in a pilot,” Henderson said.

For example, Caylent customer Smarsh—a communications compliance company with nearly 500 engineers—rebuilt their software development lifecycle on Amazon Bedrock with Claude Code.

“In year one [there was] $5 million to $10 million in engineering capacity freed and reinvested into innovation. Defect escape rates were down 15 percent to 40 percent. Lead time was down 25 percent,” Henderson said.

Caylent is seeing the same pattern across almost all of its customers who are seeing an average of 70 percent productivity increases, along with prototype-to-production cycles running twice as fast as traditional methods.

“That’s forward-deployed engineering translating into a number a CFO will stand behind,” she said.

No AWS Frontier Model Ahead, But AWS Bedrock Controls ‘Every Layer Underneath’

When asked during Amazon’s Q2 earnings about whether the company needs its own frontier model, CEO Jassy said that “AWS and Amazon can have a wildly successful business without its own frontier model.”

Jassy said that’s because there’s “not going to be one model to rule the world” as seen with the popularity of Anthropic and OpenAI models. “We have all [the models] in Bedrock, and it’s one of the many reasons why Bedrock is growing so quickly,” he said.

Caylent’s CTO said what’s easy to miss is that AWS now “essentially controls every layer underneath that choice”—including data centers and power; Trainium and Graviton silicon alongside Nvidia; SageMaker and Bedrock for models; as well as AgentCore and Lambda MicroVMs for running agents.

“That’s a different competitive position than a company that’s good at one layer and reselling the rest,” he said.

In fact, CEO Henderson said Caylent now runs more than 500 AI workloads on Amazon Bedrock.

“We run more than 500 AI workloads on Amazon Bedrock, and the pattern holds: the model that wins isn’t the newest or the biggest, it’s the one that fits the job,” said Henderson.

“[Anthropic’s] Claude Code drives more activity across our customer base than 98 percent of everything else we run combined, not because it’s the cheapest option, but because it’s the right one for that work,” she said. “Bedrock’s Intelligent Prompt Routing takes that same idea and automates it, which is the practical difference between a catalog and a platform.”

AWS Q2 2026 Earnings Results; $169B Annual Run Rate

Seattle-based AWS generated $42.2 billion in total revenue during the second quarter of 2026, elevating Amazon’s cloud unit to a record $169 billion annual run rate.

AWS’ Q2 2026 year-over-year growth rate was 37 percent, marking the company’s highest growth rate in 18 quarters.

Operating income was $16.6 billion for AWS, an increase of 63 percent compared with $10.2 billion in second quarter 2025.