سباق الذكاء الاصطناعي العالمي: أمازون وجوجل تتصدران الإنفاق وسط حرب مواهب شرسة

Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics this year, the latest tech giant to vow fresh enormous investments in the artificial intelligence arms race. The news of the investment comes one day after the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced it was cutting approximately a third of employees. Amazon also reported $213bn in revenue on Thursday. The fourth-quarter earnings of the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant came in slightly below Wall Street estimates even as sales and growth surged. Amazon will increase capital spending to $200bn this year from $125bn, CEO Andy Jassy said in a press release. Wall Street analysts were expecting spending to rise to roughly $147bn, according to FactSet. “With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital,” Jassy said. Amazon’s investment is the latest sign that cloud-computing giants will not be hitting the brakes any time soon on hefty AI investments. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and Meta are expected to collectively spend more than $630bn this year. Revenue at Amazon rose 14% to $213.4bn in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, compared with $187.8bn in the year-ago period. The company reported net income of $21.2bn, or $1.95 per share, for the three-month period ending on 31 December. That compares with $20bn, or $1.86 per share, in the year-ago quarter. Analysts had expected $1.97 per share on sales of $211.4bn, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Amazon reported the fastest growth in its prominent cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in 13 quarters, with revenue increasing 24% to $35.6bn. Advertising revenue rose 22%, per a press release. Bezos, owner of the Post, is the executive chair of Amazon’s board of directors, a role he assumed in 2021 after founding Amazon in 1994 and serving as CEO for the better part of three decades. He purchased the Post for $250m in 2013. Amazon stock makes up the majority of his $235bn net worth, which Forbes estimated sank by $9bn, just 3.7%, after Amazon’s disappointing earnings. Shares were down close to 9% in after-hours trading. “The aspirations of this news organization are diminished,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who won 11 Pulitzer prizes while helming the newspaper, told the Guardian in an interview. “I think that’ll translate into fewer subscribers. And I hope it’s not a death spiral, but I worry that it might be.”

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. After rolling out age verification last year, Roblox is aiming to grow the number of players over 18 on its platform. As noted in its 2025 year-end earnings report, 45 percent of Roblox’s daily active users have completed an age check as of January 31st. Of those who have verified their age, 27 percent are adults. Roblox also reported that this age category is spending more money on its platform than users under 18. Roblox is planning to try to pull in more adult players by expanding certain “high-fidelity” genres on its platform, as the earnings report notes: “We are prioritizing some of the largest and highest-monetizing genres in the gaming market—e.g. Shooters, RPGs, and Sports & Racing.” Roblox is also putting more emphasis on performance and graphics quality as part of its push to attract older audiences. The shift toward players over 18 follows a wave of lawsuits over child safety on Roblox, including in Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana. In addition to age checks, Roblox has rolled out a number of changes intended to improve kids’ safety on its platform, including age-gated content, content labels, an experiences rating system, and more parental controls.

Amazon Web Services ended 2025 with its strongest quarterly growth rate in more than three years. The company reported Thursday that its cloud service business recorded $35.6 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. This figure marks a 24% year-on-year increase and the business segment’s largest growth rate in 13 quarters. Annual revenue run rate for the business segment is $142 billion, according to Amazon. The cloud service also saw an increase in its operating income from $12.5 billion in the fourth quarter compared to $10.6 billion in the same period in 2024. “It’s very different having 24% year-over-year growth on $142 billion annualized run rate than to have a higher percentage growth on a meaningfully smaller base, which is the case with our competitors,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We continue to add more incremental revenue and capacity than others, and extend our leadership position.” That fourth-quarter growth was fueled by new agreements with Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity, and the U.S. Air Force, among other companies and government entities. “More of the top 500 U.S. startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the next two providers combined,” Jassy said. “We’re adding significant easy to core computing capacity each day.” AWS also added more than a gigawatt of power to its data center network in the fourth quarter. Jassy said AWS still sees a fair amount of its business coming from enterprises that want to move infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. AWS is, of course, also seeing a boost from the AI boom, and Jassy credited AWS’s top-to-bottom AI stack functionality. Techcrunch event TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026: Tickets Live On June 23 in Boston, more than 1,100 founders come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Save up to $300 on your pass or save up to 30% with group tickets for teams of four or more. TechCrunch Founder Summit: Tickets Live On June 23 in Boston, more than 1,100 founders come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Save up to $300 on your pass or save up to 30% with group tickets for teams of four or more. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW “We consistently see customers wanting to run their AI workloads where the rest of their applications and data are,” Jassy said. “We’re also seeing that as customers run large AI workloads on AWS, they’re adding to their core AWS footprint as well.” AWS made up 16.6% of Amazon’s overall $213.4 billion revenue in the fourth quarter. AWS’s success wasn’t enough to appease Amazon investors, however. Amazon shares fell 10% in after-hours trading after investors reacted to the company’s plan to boost capital expenditures and missed Wall Street’s expectations on earnings per share.

Sometimes, it can seem like the AI industry is racing to see who can spend the most money on data centers. Whoever builds the most data centers will have the most compute, the thinking goes, and thus be able to build the best AI products, which will guarantee victory in the years to come. There are limits to this way of thinking — traditionally, businesses eventually succeed by making more money and spending less — but it’s proven remarkably persuasive for large tech companies. If that is the game, Amazon does seem to be winning. The company announced in its earnings on Thursday that it projects $200 billion in capital expenditures throughout 2026, across “AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.” That’s up from the $131.8 billion in capex in 2025. It’s tempting to attribute the whole capex budget to AI. But unlike most of its competitors, Amazon has a significant physical plant, some of which is being converted for use by expensive robots, so the non-AI expenses aren’t so easy to wave away. Google is close behind. In its earnings on Wednesday, the company projected between $175 billion and $185 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, up from $91.4 billion the previous year. It’s significantly more than the company spent on fixed assets last year, and significantly more than most of its competitors are spending. Meta, which reported last week, projected $115 billion to $135 billion in capex spending for 2026, while Oracle (once the poster child for AI infrastructure) projects a measly $50 billion. Microsoft doesn’t have an official projection for 2026 yet, but the most recent quarterly figure was $37.5 billion, which pencils out to roughly $150 billion, assuming it keeps up. It’s a notable increase, and one that has led to investor pressure on CEO Satya Nadella — but it still puts the company in third place. From within the tech world, the logic here is simple. The revolutionary potential of AI is going to turn high-end compute into the scarce resource of the future, and only companies that control their own supply will survive. But while Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and others are frantically prepping for the compute desert of the future, their investors aren’t convinced. Each company saw its stock price plummet as investors balked at the hundreds of billions of dollars being committed, and companies with higher spends tended to drop more. Crucially, this isn’t just a problem for companies like Meta that haven’t figured out their AI product strategy yet. It’s everyone — even companies like Microsoft and Amazon with a robust cloud business and a straightforward take on how to make money in the AI era. The numbers are simply too high for investor comfort. Techcrunch event TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026: Tickets Live On June 23 in Boston, more than 1,100 founders come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Save up to $300 on your pass or save up to 30% with group tickets for teams of four or more. TechCrunch Founder Summit: Tickets Live On June 23 in Boston, more than 1,100 founders come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Save up to $300 on your pass or save up to 30% with group tickets for teams of four or more. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Investor sentiment isn’t everything — and in this case, it may not do much to change the industry’s mind. If you believe AI is about to change everything (and the argument is pretty compelling at this point), you’d be a fool to change course just because Wall Street got jumpy. But going forward, Big Tech companies will be under a lot of pressure to downplay how expensive their AI ambitions really are.

Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI “acqui-hires” in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq’s inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs. The latest reshuffle began three weeks ago, when OpenAI announced it was rehiring several researchers who had departed less than two years earlier to join Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines. At the same time, Anthropic, which was itself founded by former OpenAI staffers, has been poaching talent from the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI, in turn, just hired a former Anthropic safety researcher to be its “head of preparedness.” The hiring churn happening in Silicon Valley represents the “great unbundling” of the tech startup, as Dave Munichiello, an investor at GV, put it. In earlier eras, tech founders and their first employees often stayed onboard until either the lights went out or there was a major liquidity event. But in today’s market, where generative AI startups are growing rapidly, equipped with plenty of capital, and prized especially for the strength of their research talent, “you invest in a startup knowing it could be broken up,” Munichiello told me. Early founders and researchers at the buzziest AI startups are bouncing around to different companies for a range of reasons. A big incentive for many, of course, is money. Last year Meta was reportedly offering top AI researchers compensation packages in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, offering them not just access to cutting-edge computing resources but also … generational wealth. But it’s not all about getting rich. Broader cultural shifts that rocked the tech industry in recent years have made some workers worried about committing to one company or institution for too long, says Sayash Kapoor, a computer science researcher at Princeton University and a senior fellow at Mozilla. Employers used to safely assume that workers would stay at least until the four-year mark when their stock options were typically scheduled to vest. In the high-minded era of the 2000s and 2010s, plenty of early cofounders and employees also sincerely believed in the stated missions of their companies and wanted to be there to help achieve them. Now, Kapoor says, “people understand the limitations of the institutions they’re working in, and founders are more pragmatic.” The founders of Windsurf, for example, may have calculated their impact could be larger at a place like Google that has lots of resources, Kapoor says. He adds that a similar shift is happening within academia. Over the past five years, Kapoor says, he’s seen more PhD researchers leave their computer-science doctoral programs to take jobs in industry. There are higher opportunity costs associated with staying in one place at a time when AI innovation is rapidly accelerating, he says. Investors, wary of becoming collateral damage in the AI talent wars, are taking steps to protect themselves. Max Gazor, the founder of Striker Venture Partners, says his team is vetting founding teams “for chemistry and cohesion more than ever.” Gazor says it’s also increasingly common for deals to include “protective provisions that require board consent for material IP licensing or similar scenarios.” Gazor notes that some of the biggest acqui-hire deals that have happened recently involved startups founded long before the current generative AI boom. Scale AI, for example, was founded in 2016, a time when the kind of deal Wang negotiated with Meta would have been unfathomable to many. Now, however, these potential outcomes might be considered in early term sheets and “constructively managed,” Gazor explains.