Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making a major new push into public-sector AI, announcing a $50 billion investment to build high-performance computing infrastructure specifically for U.S. government agencies.
New AI Infrastructure Designed for Federal Use
AWS said the project will add 1.3 gigawatts of compute capacity and expand federal access to its full suite of AI products, including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, model-tuning services, deployment tools, and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
Construction on the new data center projects is expected to begin in 2026.
AWS CEO Matt Garman said the investment will “transform how federal agencies leverage supercomputing,” enabling faster progress in areas such as cybersecurity and drug discovery. He added that the plan aims to remove technology constraints that have slowed government AI adoption.
AWS has a long history of working with U.S. federal agencies, beginning with its government-focused cloud infrastructure in 2011. It later launched AWS Top Secret-East in 2014 and AWS Secret Region in 2017 to support classified workloads.
Tech Companies Compete for Government AI Deals
The announcement comes during a period of heightened competition among tech giants hoping to provide AI tools to the U.S. government.
OpenAI launched a government-only version of ChatGPT in January and struck a deal in August to offer the enterprise tier of ChatGPT to federal agencies for $1 a year. Anthropic made a similar offer around the same time, and Google introduced its competing “Google for Government” at 47 cents for the first year.
Featured image credits: Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons
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