Amazon will spend roughly $200 billion in 2026, mostly on AWS AI infrastructure, the company revealed February 5 during its Q4 earnings call. That's up from $130 billion in 2025 and well above Wall Street's $144-150 billion estimates. Shares dropped 11.5% in after-hours trading.
CEO Andy Jassy defended the spending: "As fast as we install this AI capacity, we are monetizing it." AWS added 3.9 gigawatts of power capacity in the last 12 months - twice its 2022 total - and plans to double that again by end of 2027. The cloud giant generated $35.6 billion in Q4 sales, up 24% year-over-year, with 35% operating margins.
The capacity can't come fast enough. "We could actually grow faster if we had all the supply that we could take," Jassy said. AWS now runs at a $142 billion annualized rate, up from $80 billion in 2022. The company recently deployed its "Rainier" project with approximately 500,000 Trainium2 chips for Anthropic's Claude models.
For enterprises evaluating AWS AI infrastructure, the capacity constraints are real. Jassy described AI demand as "barbelled" - heavy lab spending at one end, enterprise productivity at the other, with middle-market production workloads representing future growth. AWS's custom Trainium and Graviton chips are projected to generate over $10 billion in revenue this year, offering alternatives to GPU instances for cost-conscious enterprise workloads.
The market reaction suggests investors want more than growth promises. JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth pressed for "financial guardrails" on returns. Jassy's response: Amazon has "a fair bit of experience" forecasting demand and avoiding wasted capacity. "This isn't some quixotic topline grab," he said, pointing to AWS's core business track record.
The scale is staggering. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta will collectively spend over $500 billion on infrastructure in 2026, with roughly 80% of Amazon's portion AI-related. Whether enterprises can secure enough capacity for their AI workloads remains the practical question - not whether AWS will build it.