Amazon (AMZN) is the latest technology giant to announce it will continue spending massive amounts of cash on artificial intelligence, even after Chinese startup DeepSeek’s success.
CEO Andy Jassy said on an earnings call on Thursday that the company’s $26.3 billion in capital expenditures last quarter is “reasonably representative” of what has been budgeted for 2025. If continued, that would put Amazon on track to spend more than $100 billion this year, which most of the cash supporting AI services and tech infrastructure.
“The vast majority of that CapEx spend is on AI for [Amazon Web Services],” Jassy said on the call, calling that spending a “good sign” for AWS. “[W]e think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it and with inference being a core building block, just like compute and storage and database.”
Amazon has introduced a number of new AI-based products and invested heavily in Anthropic, a startup founded by ex-OpenAI staffers. The Seattle-based company in December even unveiled its own AI training chips, the Trainium3, which are expected to be available in late 2025.
It’s not the only tech leader planning to spend billions on AI this year, as demand remains intense.
Microsoft (MSFT) in early January said it plans to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in its fiscal year 2025, which ends on June 30. The data centers will be used for training and deploying AI models and cloud-based applications. More than half of the investment will be focused in the U.S., Microsoft President Brad Smith said at the time.
“As we look into the future, it’s clear that artificial intelligence is poised to become a world-changing GPT [General-Purpose Technology],” Smith said in a statement. “AI promises to drive innovation and boost productivity in every sector of the economy.
Later in January, Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post that the Facebook and Instagram-owned will spend between $60 billion and $65 billion in capital expenditures on AI this year. He wrote that Meta’s Llama 4 model is expected to “become the leading state of the art model” this year, and that the company plans to “build an AI engineer” that can contribute more code to its research and development efforts.
Google-parent (GOOGL) Alphabet said it would spend $75 billion on AI this year, 29% greater than Wall Street had expected. “The cost of actually using [AI] is going to keep coming down, which will make more use cases feasible,” CEO Sundar Pichai said on an earnings call, adding that Google is investing to “meet the moment.”
OpenAI last month announced Stargate, a planned $500 billion AI infrastructure project backed by SoftBank (SFTBY) and Oracle (ORCL), among others. That cash would be doled out over the next four years.
Silicon Valley’s major spending on AI was called into question after DeepSeek claimed it had spent cost just $5.6 million to train and develop an AI model that rivaled models made by OpenAI and Meta. Tech stocks entered a freefall after Wall Street caught wind, giving chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) the biggest one-day drop in market value in history.
However, some tech leaders are calling into question whether what DeepSeek achieved was actually done on such a low budget. Meta has reportedly set up “war rooms” to investigate the models, while Microsoft is probing whether DeepSeek had access to OpenAI’s tech.
