Amazon still wants to invest about $100 billion in AWS by 2025. That AI development can be more efficient, the company does not believe at this time.
Amazon wants to invest $100 billion by 2025, the bulk of which will go to AWS. There, the company wants to expand the AI capabilities of its cloud division. In 2024, Amazon still invested $78 billion.
Amazon thus follows other tech giants. Meta plans to invest “hundreds of billions” in the near future, including at least $60 billion by 2025. Again, the money is going to AI. Alphabet (Google) has increased its investments by more than 40 percent to $75 billion for the same reason. Microsoft is going to pump $80 billion into data center construction alone by 2025.
The investments are both expected and striking. Until a few weeks ago, huge data centers filled with expensive accelerators seemed the only path toward AI development. All major technology companies want to remain active at the forefront of that AI development. They hope to buy that leadership position with their dollars.
(Limited) impact of DeepSeek
In January, however, Chinese researchers launched DeepSeek R1. That’s a competitive LLM that performs on par with the best systems OpenAI can offer today. Only: the Chinese were able to make DeepSeek without access to modern AI accelerators and at a fraction of the development cost that AWS, Google, Meta and Microsoft consider the norm.
The realization caused shock waves in the stock market. Investors and specialists began to question whether the billion-dollar investments were really necessary. However, the much introspection is not happening at the moment. The fear of gambling wrong and being left behind is too great. Certainly this year AWS, like the other major AI specialists, plans progress yet to measure in billions invested.