Amazon is investing $10 billion in North Carolina data centers as part of its record-breaking $100 billion AI infrastructure spending plan for 2025, creating 500 jobs while joining an unprecedented tech industry arms race worth over $300 billion.
Key Points:
- Amazon will spend $10B on North Carolina data centers, creating 500 new jobs
- It’s part of a larger $100B annual capex budget, mostly focused on AI
- Tech giants are collectively spending over $300 billion in 2025 on AI infrastructure
The cloud giants are spending like it’s 1999, and Amazon is leading the charge. The company announced this week it will invest a staggering $10 billion in Richmond County, North Carolina, to build out new AWS data centers. Amazon is racing to stay ahead of Microsoft, Google, and Meta in a competition that CEO Andy Jassy recently called a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
The numbers are frankly ridiculous. Amazon's planning to spend $100 billion this year on infrastructure, mostly for AI. Microsoft? $80 billion. Google parent Alphabet? $75 billion. Meta? Up to $65 billion. Combined, these four companies alone are dropping over $300 billion in 2025 on the pipes and processors that'll make AI work at scale.
Amazon's spending represents a massive jump from the $83 billion it spent on infrastructure in 2024, with the "vast majority" going toward AI capabilities for AWS, according to Jassy. And apparently, they need every bit of it. Jassy told investors that AWS has "more demand that we could fulfill if we had even more capacity today," largely because of chip shortages constraining the entire industry.
The North Carolina project fits Amazon's broader strategy of building data centers in states that offer solid infrastructure, skilled workers, and business-friendly environments. Richmond County gets 500 direct jobs plus thousands more in construction and the supply chain. Amazon's also throwing in workforce training programs and a $150,000 community fund, which sounds nice but is essentially pocket change for a company spending $100 billion this year.
What's really driving all this spending? The AI gold rush that started with ChatGPT has created demand that none of these companies can fully satisfy. Amazon currently holds 30% of the global cloud market compared to Microsoft's 21% and Google's 12%, but maintaining that lead requires constant investment in new capacity.
Jassy put it bluntly: "AI represents, for sure, the biggest opportunity since cloud, and probably the biggest technology shift in business since the internet." That's CEO-speak for "we're going to spend whatever it takes to win."
The timing matters too. Amazon announced this investment right after reporting mixed Q4 earnings that spooked investors—revenue growth was slower than expected, and the stock dropped 4% in after-hours trading. But the company's message is clear: short-term bumps don't matter when you're building for what could be a decades-long AI boom.
But that's the bet Amazon and its rivals are making: that AI demand will grow so fast that today's massive investments will look reasonable in a few years. As Jassy argued, lower AI costs typically lead to higher demand—a classic example of what economists call Jevons paradox.
Whether Amazon's $10 billion North Carolina gamble pays off will depend on factors largely outside its control: how quickly AI adoption spreads, whether new chip technologies can keep up with demand, and whether the current AI hype turns into lasting business value. But one thing's certain—Amazon isn't planning to find out from the sidelines.