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CAPEXPECTATIONS

Amazon plans on spending more than $100 billion on capex in 2025

In total, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet intend to spend a whopping $315 billion in capital expenditures this year.

Jon Keegan, David Crowther

2/7/25 11:05AM

While Amazon’s Q4 earnings may have disappointed investors with some gloomy guidance for the current quarter, its plans for 2025 are grand indeed.

In the past few weeks, all of Big Tech has been revealing the scale of its plans for spending on AI infrastructure, and it’s like everyone is trying to outdo each other with increasingly massive capex estimates.

At the start of the year, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post that the company was on track to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in 2025.
Then, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company would spend up to $65 billion on capex, including a city-sized data center.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai upped the ante, pledging $75 billion for AI and related infrastructure, including undersea cables.
Not to be outdone, Amazon CFO Brian T. Olsavsky told analysts on the Q4 earnings call that his company’s Q4 capex of $26.3 billion “will be reasonably representative of our 2025 capital investment rate,” which works out to over $100 billion.

Taken together, the top players in the industry are committing over $315 billion for this year alone.

4 big tech companies plan on spending $315+ billion on capex this year

“Lumpy” growth for AWS

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sounded extremely bullish about the company’s AWS cloud computing unit — which had $28.8 billion in sales for Q4 — but warned, “We expect growth will be lumpy over the next few years,” due to fast-changing technology and unpredictable capacity planning.

Amazon is in a unique position in the current AI revolution, as it offers up solutions for each layer of the “AI stack.” It hosts cloud computing to train new models, runs any number of leading AI models, and quickly offered DeepSeek’s breakthrough models for its customers on its Bedrock and SageMaker platforms.

It also makes its own foundational model family named Nova, in addition to its Rufus AI shopping assistant, and is still working out the kinks on its next-generation Alexa.

In addition to selling cloud computing powered by market leader Nvidia, Amazon is also a few generations into its own specialized AI computing chips, “Trainium” and “Inferentia.”

When asked about the race to the bottom for computing costs fueled by new, cheaper approaches to train and run AI systems like DeepSeek, Jassy thought it would just translate into more business for the company, agreeing with Jevons Paradox:

“People thought that people would spend a lot less money on infrastructure technology. And what happens is companies will spend a lot less per unit of infrastructure, and that is very, very useful for their businesses. But then they get excited about what else they could build that they always thought was cost prohibitive before, and they usually end up spending a lot more in total on technology once you make the per unit cost less.”

Leap year wrinkle

As a reminder of the massive scale of Amazon’s business, the extra day on the 2024 calendar due to leap year actually affected the company’s guidance for the current quarter.

Just that one extra day generated $1.5 billion in sales across all of its units.

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

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A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”