News

AWS Leads Cloud Giants in Planned AI Spending

• By David Ramel
• 02/11/2025

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was early on seen by many as coming late to the cloud GenAI party compared with fellow cloud giants Google and especially Microsoft, which got a head start with OpenAI's breakthrough exemplified by GPT large language models (LLMs), but that's changing.

Coming off 2024 Q4 and full-year financial results from each company, AWS is making more money and planning more AI spending. The data from all three companies results in this full-year chart:

and this Q4 2024 chart:

In a news release about the financial results, AWS listed many AI-related initiatives among the numbers:

• General Availability of Trainium2: EC2 Trn2 instances, powered by Trainium2 AI chips, offer 30-40% better price-performance than current generations of GPU-based instances.
• Project Rainier: A collaboration with Anthropic using hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips to build the world’s largest AI compute cluster.
• New Amazon SageMaker AI features, including the ability to manage costs and prioritize which workloads should receive capacity when budgets are reached.
• The next generation of Amazon SageMaker, which brings together all of the data, analytics services and AI services into one interface to do analytics and AI more easily at scale.

And in an earnings call transcript provided by The Motley Fool, Andy Jassey, president and CEO of AWS, said: "On the capex side, as Brian mentioned earlier, we spent $26.3 billion in capex in Q4. And I think that is reasonably representative of what you could expect in annualized capex rate in 2025. The vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS."

Leveraging those strong financial results and massive AI spending, it's clearly a three-horse race in the cloud nowadays.