Amazon is set to invest up to 50bn dollars to expand artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing capacity for United States government customers, in one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments targeted at the public sector.
The e-commerce giant announced the investment on Monday.
The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of new AI and high-performance computing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud regions through new data centres equipped with advanced computing and networking systems.
One gigawatt of computing power is roughly enough to power about 750 000 US households on average.
“This investment removes the technology barriers that have held the government back”, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman, said.
AWS is already a major cloud provider to the US government, serving more than 11,000 government agencies.
Tech companies, including OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft, are pouring billions of dollars into building out AI infrastructure, boosting demand for computing power required to support the services.
