The heads of Google and Amazon have restated their commitment to investing in AI and the necessary infrastructure.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday during the Google Cloud Next 2025 conference that the company was still committed to spending around $75 billion on building out data center capacity to support AI.As reported by Reuters, the statement comes as President Donald Trump's tariffs have created some uncertainty about the potential increase in data center and IT hardware costs.
Pichai said the investment would be used to buy chips and build servers needed to support Alphabet's core services and the development of its AI offerings, adding: "The opportunity with AI is as big as it gets."
Google first announced its investment plans in February 2025 during its quarterly earnings call. Planning to spend $75 billion across the whole year, this far surpassed Wall Street's expectations of a capex of $58 billion.
Speaking to Reuters, Google Cloud's VP and GM, Sachin Gupta, said that while tariffs might increase the cost of importing hardware, the demand still necessitated investment.
President Trump's tariff plans remain uncertain. Earlier this month, he announced country-specific tariffs that varied drastically from a baseline of 10 percent to significantly higher tariffs for the "worst offenders." Those tariffs have since been paused for 90 days, placing all countries on the baseline, while tariffs for China skyrocketed. What will happen at the end of the 90 days remains unclear.
Shortly after Pichai's statements about investment, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his 2024 letter to shareholders, expressing a similar sentiment.
Jassy noted that with AI, there is a "substantial capital investment required." He notes that while the company only starts monetizing the investment many months after it is spent, "We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know, the demand is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and our customers, shareholders, and business will be well-served by our investing aggressively now."
He also noted an expectation that AI and the chips associated with it will become more affordable, citing Amazon's Tranium2 chips, which he said offer a 30-40 percent better price performance.
"We feel a strong urgency to make inference less expensive for customers,” Jassy wrote, adding that increasing efficiency in chips and improvements in model distillation, architectures, and caching will further support this.
These statements come after Microsoft faced significant scrutiny over canceled and delayed data center projects. In light of those reports,
Microsoft Cloud president Noelle Walsh posted on LinkedIn to reaffirm the company's data center strategy.
Walsh reiterated that the company is on track to meet its capex commitment for the year of $80bn, adding: "Data center planning is a multi-year and capital-intensive program we plan for years in advance to ensure we have sufficient infrastructure in the right places. In recent years, demand for our cloud and AI services grew more than we could have ever anticipated and to meet this opportunity, we began executing the largest and most ambitious infrastructure scaling project in our history.
"By nature, any significant new endeavor at this size and scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our customers. What this means is that we are slowing or pausing some early-stage projects. While we may strategically pace our plans, we will continue to grow strongly and allocate investments that stay aligned with business priorities and customer demand."
