Amazon lifts 2026 capex guidance to $200bn, mostly for AWS data centres

Amazon told investors it expected to spend roughly $200 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, up from $131.8 billion in 2025 — an increase of about 50%, not the doubling some early coverage suggested. Chief executive Andy Jassy said the company would invest “across Amazon in 2026” to meet demand for “seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites,” and that it expected a strong long-term return on the capital.

The guidance was disclosed with Amazon’s fourth-quarter 2025 results, published in February 2026, alongside AWS revenue growth of 24% to $35.6 billion — its fastest quarterly growth in more than three years. Jassy told analysts that although the capex figure spans Amazon’s whole business, including retail and logistics, spending would be “predominantly in AWS.” The scale of the forecast, well above analyst expectations of roughly $146.6 billion, contributed to a sharp fall in Amazon’s share price even as the underlying quarter beat estimates.

The figure put Amazon ahead of the other large cloud providers’ 2026 capital plans — Microsoft’s roughly $190 billion, Google’s guidance of $175–185 billion, and Meta’s $125–145 billion range — for a combined hyperscaler total of roughly $725 billion, up from about $410 billion in 2025. Coming after two years of steadily rising capex guidance across the industry, the announcement renewed a running argument among investors over whether AI-driven cloud revenue could grow fast enough to justify infrastructure spending at that scale.