Amazon Web Services is making a significant new investment in infrastructure designed to boost artificial intelligence capabilities for United States government organizations. The company announced it is investing fifty billion dollars to build high-performance computing infrastructure purposefully built for the US government. This buildout is intended to expand federal government agencies’ access to AWS AI services.
The project will add 1.3 gigawatts of compute capacity and will expand government access to AWS products. These include Amazon SageMaker AI, model customization, Amazon Bedrock, model deployment, and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, among others. AWS expects to break ground on these data center projects in 2026.
The AWS CEO stated that this investment in purpose-built government AI and cloud infrastructure will fundamentally transform how federal agencies leverage supercomputing. He said the company is giving agencies expanded access to advanced AI capabilities that will enable them to accelerate critical missions from cybersecurity to drug discovery. The investment is positioned to remove technology barriers that have held government back and further position America to lead in the AI era.
AWS is no stranger to working with the US government. The entity began building cloud infrastructure for the government back in 2011. Three years later, it launched AWS Top Secret-East, the first air-gapped commercial cloud to work with classified workloads. AWS introduced the AWS Secret Region in 2017, which has accredited access to all levels of security classification.
Tech giants have increasingly pitched their AI services to the US government over the past year. OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT designed exclusively for federal US government agencies in January. OpenAI announced a deal in August that gave government agencies access to the enterprise tier of ChatGPT for just one dollar a year. That same month, Anthropic announced it was also giving the US government access to the enterprise tiers of its Claude chatbot for one dollar. Google announced its Google for Government platform for even less, charging forty-seven cents for the first year, shortly after.