Amazon’s Cloud Liftoff

Talk about raising the stakes. A day after Google parent Alphabet scared the market by projecting plans to double its capital expenditures to around $180 billion, Amazon went one better by announcing it plans to lay out $200 billion on capex this year, 56% higher than what it spent in 2025. Investors were just as unimpressed as they had been with Google: Amazon stock dropped as much as 10% in after-hours trading. That’s despite the fact that, also like Google on Wednesday, Amazon reported solid fourth-quarter results—highlighted by a four-percentage point acceleration in its Amazon Web Services cloud unit’s revenue growth to 24%.

Of course, market conditions couldn’t have been worse: Investors have turned extremely risk averse in recent days, dumping tech stocks left and right as well as crypto (for more on the cryptopocalypse, see below) and even precious metals like gold on Thursday. In the past week, big tech names like Microsoft and Nvidia are down about 10%, while software stocks such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Palantir have fallen between 10% and 20%, according to Koyfin. Conscious of investor worries about AI’s costs, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made an impassioned pitch on an analyst conference call Thursday evening as he described what he believed to be a “huge opportunity” represented by AI as more businesses figure out how to use it throughout their operations.