Amazon Web Services is marking its entry into the lucrative business of providing the U.S. government with artificial intelligence and high-performance computing services via purpose-built infrastructure for which it has committed up to $50 billion in construction and equipment. The investment “will add nearly 1.3 GW of compute capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (U.S.) across all classification levels,” Amazon says, adding that the commitment “expands access to AWS’s trusted infrastructure” and advances America’s AI leadership and enables U.S. agencies “to accelerate discovery and decision-making.”

The agreement will provide AWS government customers “access to a broad set of AI tools, as well as hardware from AWS and Nvidia,” allowing them to “build their own AI systems” and “more easily handle large amounts of data and increase efficiencies,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

The deal also provides federal agencies with expanded access to Amazon SageMaker AI for model training and customization, Amazon Bedrock for model and agent deployment, Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude foundation models as well as other leading open-weights contenders and AWS’ custom Trainium AI chips.

“Our investment in purpose-built government AI and cloud infrastructure will fundamentally transform how federal agencies leverage supercomputing,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in an announcement. “We’re giving agencies expanded access to advanced AI capabilities,” accelerating critical missions ranging from cybersecurity to drug development.

“This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era,” Garman added.

“Amazon has sought to bolster its standings within the fast-moving AI race by rapidly adding to its cloud-computing infrastructure,” writes WSJ, citing CEO Andy Jassy’s Q3 earnings call comments on adding “3.8 gigawatts of data-center capacity over the past 12 months — a vast number of power for AI chips that the company said was more than any of its rivals over that period.”

The move follows “announcements from Anthropic and Meta to expand AI data centers in the U.S.” notes CNBC, pointing out that in addition, “Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank announced their Stargate joint venture in January, which aims to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. over the next four years.”

Those deals, however, were not presented in the context of purpose-built government facilities. AWS currently “serves more than 11,000 government agencies,” per CNBC.

Bloomberg writes that overall, AWS data center operations are “much larger than commonly understood, totaling more than 900 facilities in more than 50 countries.”

Related:
Amazon’s $50 Billion U.S. Infrastructure Pledge Makes 2025’s Top AI Deals (Full List, Ranked), Forbes, 11/24/25
Amazon Plans to Invest $15 Billion in Northern Indiana to Build New Data Center Campuses and Advance AI Innovation, Amazon, 11/24/25