Amazon Web Services leaders met with engineers in May and delivered a sobering message: To ensure AWS has enough capacity for all its customers at its popular EC2 cloud server business in the future, engineers should save capacity however they can, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.

That includes capacity on servers that run on central processing units, as well as those running on AI chips, which have long been in short supply, the person said. CPUs are the chips that have powered the last several decades of the internet age. Since then, some engineers within AWS have found it takes much longer to get capacity on CPU servers for their work.

Amazon stock surged in after hours trading after the ecommerce-and-cloud firm reported that revenue from its cloud division Amazon Web Services soared 37% in the second quarter, nine percentage points faster than the first quarter, bringing the division’s revenue to $42.2 billion. AWS’ operating ...