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Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics this year, the latest tech giant to vow fresh enormous investments in the artificial intelligence arms race.
The news of the investment comes one day after the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced it was cutting approximately a third of employees.
Amazon also reported $213bn in revenue on Thursday. The fourth-quarter earnings of the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant came in slightly below Wall Street estimates even as sales and growth surged.
Amazon will increase capital spending to $200bn this year from $125bn, CEO Andy Jassy said in a press release. Wall Street analysts were expecting spending to rise to roughly $147bn, according to FactSet.
“With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital,” Jassy said.
Amazon’s investment is the latest sign that cloud-computing giants will not be hitting the brakes any time soon on hefty AI investments. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and Meta are expected to collectively spend more than $630bn this year.
Revenue at Amazon rose 14% to $213.4bn in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, compared with $187.8bn in the year-ago period. The company reported net income of $21.2bn, or $1.95 per share, for the three-month period ending on 31 December. That compares with $20bn, or $1.86 per share, in the year-ago quarter.
Analysts had expected $1.97 per share on sales of $211.4bn, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Amazon reported the fastest growth in its prominent cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in 13 quarters, with revenue increasing 24% to $35.6bn. Advertising revenue rose 22%, per a press release.
Bezos, owner of the Post, is the executive chair of Amazon’s board of directors, a role he assumed in 2021 after founding Amazon in 1994 and serving as CEO for the better part of three decades. He purchased the Post for $250m in 2013. Amazon stock makes up the majority of his $235bn net worth, which Forbes estimated sank by $9bn, just 3.7%, after Amazon’s disappointing earnings. Shares were down close to 9% in after-hours trading.
“The aspirations of this news organization are diminished,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who won 11 Pulitzer prizes while helming the newspaper, told the Guardian in an interview. “I think that’ll translate into fewer subscribers. And I hope it’s not a death spiral, but I worry that it might be.”
