Amazon expects to spend $200 billion on data centers and other equipment this year, topping its big technology rivals in a spending spree to build out artificial intelligence networks.
The Seattle-based firm's projected spending is even higher than the capital expenditures announced in the past week by Microsoft, Meta and Google parent Alphabet. With Amazon, the four firms plan to spend as much as $640 billion on real estate and AI networks in 2026.
Amazon's spending estimate is well above both the $130 billion in capital expenditures that the firm reported spending last year and the $146 billion that analysts estimated for 2026.
Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy attributed the increased investment to “strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics and low earth orbit satellites.”
Most of Amazon's spending this year will be on AI data centers serving Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud-computing division, Jassy said.
”If you really want to use AI in an expansive way, you need your data in the cloud and you need your applications in the cloud,” Jassy told analysts during the company's earnings call Thursday. “This this isn't some sort of quixotic top-line grab. We have confidence that these investments will yield strong returns on invested capital.”
Sales from the firm’s AWS cloud computing segment jumped a higher-than-expected 24% year-over-year to $35.6 billion. Jassy said AWS could grow even faster if it had the data center capacity to accommodate all the demand, "so we are being incredibly scrappy around that.”
Amazon’s cloud computing has added 3.9 gigawatts of computing power over the past year alone — twice what AWS had in 2022 — and expects to double its computing power again by the end of 2027, he adds.
The firm in October fully activated Project Rainier, its massive AI supercomputing center and data center campus in New Carlisle, Indiana, operated in collaboration with AI language model maker Anthropic.
Amazon doubled down on its AI spending even as Meta, Microsoft and other tech peers have found themselves increasingly defending their staggeringly high expenditures that have roiled financial markets over the past week, as some analysts question whether the spending could be contributing to an investment bubble.
AI speeds deliveries
Even so, Amazon is also using AI in its fulfillment centers to power robots and drive efficiency as it looks to expand fast deliveries in remote part of the U.S. and across the globe, working to cut delivery times to 30 minutes or less in some test markets.
The firm doubled the number of U.S. customers receiving same-day delivery in part by converting existing rural delivery stations across 44 states into “hybrid hubs” that place products closer to customers.
The e-commerce giant delivered packages at the fastest speeds ever globally in 2025, and shipped nearly 70% more same-day items in the U.S. than the year before, with nearly 100 million customers receiving the service.
As part of those efforts, the firm expanded its Amazon Now, a service that delivers thousands of items to customers in 30 minutes or less. Amazon is testing the service in several cities in the U.S., United Kingdom and cities in India, Mexico and United Arab Emirates.
Amazon also expanded fast grocery delivery to more than 2,300 U.S. cities, with perishables making up nine of the top 10 most-ordered items in areas where the service is available.