AWS is spending $50B build AI infrastructure for the US government

Amazon Web Services is making a sizable new investment in infrastructure designed to boost AI capabilities for U.S. government organizations.

AWS announced Monday it is investing $50 billion to build AI “high-performance computing infrastructure” purposefully built for the U.S. government. The buildout is meant to expand federal government agencies’ access to AWS AI services.

The project will add 1.3 gigawatts of compute and will expand government access to AWS products, including Amazon SageMaker AI, model customization, Amazon Bedrock, model deployment, and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, among others, according to the company.

AWS expects to break ground on these data center projects in 2026.

“Our investment in purpose-built government AI and cloud infrastructure will fundamentally transform how federal agencies leverage supercomputing,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in the company’s press release. “We’re giving agencies expanded access to advanced AI capabilities that will enable them to accelerate critical missions from cybersecurity to drug discovery. This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era.”

AWS is no stranger to working with the U.S. government.

The entity began building cloud infrastructure for the U.S. government back in 2011. Three years later it launched AWS Top Secret-East, the first air-gapped commercial cloud to work with classified workloads. AWS introduced AWS Secret Region in 2017, which has accredited access to all levels of security classification.

Tech giants have increasingly pitched their AI services to the U.S. government over the past year.

OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT designed exclusively for federal U.S. government agencies in January. OpenAI announced a deal in August that gave government agencies access to the enterprise tier of ChatGPT for just $1 a year.

That same month, Anthropic announced it was also giving the U.S. Government access to the enterprise tiers of its Claude chatbot for $1. Google announced “Google for Government” for even less, charging 47 cents for the first year, shortly after.