Amazon To Spend $100B On AI In 2025 As A Data Center Arms Race Brews
Amazon could have made more money last quarter if it had been able to keep up with demand for computing power, according to its CEO.
“It is true we could be growing faster were it not for some of the constraints on capacity,” Andy Jassy told analysts on the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday.
In an effort to catch up, the e-commerce and tech giant plans to invest roughly $100B on its cloud computing business in 2025, with the majority of the capital expenditure going towards data centers, internal chip manufacturing and equipment acquisitions.
Amazon is the latest tech firm to announce large outlays for AI investment. The corporate giants are opening their coffers despite the surprise release of DeepSeek, a large language model developed by a Chinese firm with significantly less resources and computing power than the leading U.S. models.
“AI represents for sure the biggest opportunity since cloud and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the internet,” Jassy said on the call.
Amazon spent roughly $78B on capex in 2024, with a record $26B being spent in Q4. Executives said the fourth-quarter spending was likely to reflect their capex for each quarter through 2025, which would push this year's commitment above $100B.
Amazon doubled its spending on industrial property acquisitions in 2024, spending more than $2B across at least 39 transactions, a Bisnow analysis found.
The outlays weighed on Amazon’s Q4 profits and are expected to eat into margins in 2025. Amazon’s stock slid more than 3% in early trading Friday.
Executives at Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft have all signaled they plan to continue to pour money into data centers and tech infrastructure, driven by the belief that AI will eventually be baked into everyday life and that the path to improving AI models is through more computing power.
“We think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it,” Jassy said on the call.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told investors on an earnings call this week that the firm plans to spend $75B on capex in 2025, $17B more than Wall Street had been projecting. Meta’s planned $65B in capex is 70% higher than investors had predicted.
In 2023, Microsoft made a $13B investment into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, but CEO Sam Altman said the inventor of Windows wasn’t able to keep up with its computing demands. Microsoft plans to spend roughly $80B on AI investments in 2025.
Data center development is also a key policy point for President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Altman was joined by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at the White House in late January to announce their own combined $100B commitment to building out AI infrastructure.
The joint venture’s plan includes 10 data centers that are already under construction in Abilene, Texas, along with another 10 data centers at the site. That project and others could bring the total investment to $500B, Trump said.
“We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President,” Altman told Trump during a press conference on Jan. 21. “The fact that we get to do this in the United States is, I think, wonderful.”
