Tech & Innovation

Amazon’s holiday quarter was big. Its AI budget is bigger

Amazon’s earnings showed momentum across AWS and ads. Then, the company dared AI-hungry investors to underwrite its $200 billion long game

ByShannon Carroll

Share to XShare to FacebookShare to RedditShare to EmailShare to Link

Published Yesterday|Updated 11 hours ago

Add Quartz on Google

Share to XShare to FacebookShare to RedditShare to EmailShare to Link

Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images

Amazon $AMZN -5.55%’s fourth-quarter earnings had two distinct personalities. The first was the one investors have been paying for lately: a cleaner, sharper Amazon that’s figured out how to make its scale throw off real profit. The second was the one Amazon can’t stop becoming when the next platform shift shows up on the horizon: a company willing to pour concrete, string fiber, and buy chips like it’s trying to build the future faster than anyone can invoice it.

Both versions showed up in the same document. The quarter itself was strong. And then CEO Andy Jassy volunteered the sentence that made everything else feel like preamble: “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.”

The market’s response wasn’t “Nice quarter.” It was “Excuse me, you’re spending HOW much?”

In a week when investors have started treating AI spending plans the way Americans treat rising restaurant menu prices — with widening eyes and a sudden interest in doing the math — Amazon effectively walked up to order the tasting menu for the whole table. Shares fell as much as 10% in after-hours trading. Big Tech’s capex plans have become the market’s favorite form of indigestion, and a bad tape doesn’t exactly make investors more patient about long-dated........

© Quartz