Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at a launch event in New York on February 26, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AmazonThe company’s shares plunged 11% in extended trading Thursday, dragged down by market turmoil over the company’s $200 billion capital investment plan, the most expensive among mega-cap companies.
The forecast is a significant increase from Amazon’s capital spending last year, which exceeded analysts’ expectations by more than $50 billion. The company reported spending about $131 billion on property and equipment purchases in 2025, up from about $83 billion a year earlier.
Ever since OpenAI ushered in the modern era of artificial intelligence infrastructure with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, tech companies have laid out aggressive spending plans for artificial intelligence infrastructure, and as of early 2026, these extravagant efforts will only increase.
Google’s parent company alphabet On Wednesday, Meta said it would spend up to $185 billion in 2026, but Meta last week said capital spending could nearly double from a year earlier to $115 billion to $135 billion in 2026.
On a conference call with investors, Wall Street analysts called on Amazon executives to provide more clarity on the spending spree and when it would start turning a profit. In prepared remarks at the beginning of the conference call, CEO Andy Jassy said he was “confident” that the company’s cloud division would achieve “significant returns on invested capital,” but he declined to say when that would happen.
“Help us get to a level of confidence that we can get strong long-term returns on our invested capital,” Mark Mahaney, head of internet research at Evercore ISI, told Jassy.
Jassy said the company needs capital to meet Amazon’s “very high demand” for AI computing, which requires more infrastructure such as data centers, chips and networking equipment.
“This is not some kind of crazy, top-line acquisition,” Jassy said. “We believe these investments will deliver strong returns on invested capital. We’ve done that with our core AWS business, and we think that’s just as true here.”
Amazon Web Services’ revenue rose 24% in the latest period to $35.6 billion, beating analyst expectations and marking the cloud sector’s “fastest growth in 13 quarters,” Jassy said.
“We could have grown faster if AWS had more capacity to meet demand,” he said, “so we’re being incredibly cautious about that.”
The company’s cloud division added nearly 4 gigawatts of computing power in 2025, and AWS expects to double that capacity by the end of 2027, Jassy said.
Barclays analyst Ross Sandler asked Jassy how he sees the AI market evolving from the current situation where it’s “a bit of a top-tier situation with a lot of spending concentrated in a few AI-native labs.”
Jassy said the AI market has become more of a “barbell,” with AI labs on one side and companies on the other, looking to the technology as a “productivity and cost avoidance” tool. The middle, he said, is made up of companies at various stages of building AI applications.
“The middle section of the barbell may end up being the largest and most durable part,” Jassy said.
Attention: Amazon stock falls due to poor earnings, capital investment forecast for 2026 is $200 billion
