Amazon pledges up to US$50 billion to expand AI, supercomputing for U.S. government

Amazon.com said on Monday it would invest up to US$50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing capabilities for Amazon Web Services U.S. government customers, in one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments targeted at the public sector.

The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud regions by building data centers equipped with advanced compute and networking technologies.

AWS cloud regions for U.S. government are based on increasing levels of data sensitivity. The cloud unit currently serves more than 11,000 U.S. government agencies.

“While Amazon still leads the cloud market, it has lost ground on AI-related cloud growth as Google and Oracle speed up, making large-scale infrastructure commitments necessary strategies,” said Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.

Tech companies, including OpenAI, Alphabet GOOGL.O and Microsoft MSFT.O, are pouring billions of dollars to develop AI infrastructure, boosting demand for computing power required to support the services.

One gigawatt of computing power is roughly enough to power about 750,000 U.S. households on average.

“This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back,” AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman said. Amazon did not disclose the timeline for the spending.

Under the latest initiative, federal agencies will gain access to AWS’ comprehensive suite of AI services, including Amazon SageMaker for model training and customization, Amazon Bedrock for deploying models and agents, as well as foundation models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude.

The federal government seeks to develop tailored AI solutions and drive cost-savings by leveraging AWS’ dedicated and expanded capacity.

The U.S. is in an AI arms race with China and will significantly increase its AI compute capacity to maintain its lead, said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria.

The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)