Amazon.com Inc. today announced it plans to invest up to $50 billion to expand artificial intelligence and high-performance supercomputing infrastructure for the United States government.

The massive investment will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of AI and supercomputing power across Amazon Web Services’ Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud through the construction and expansion of data centers with advanced compute and networking capabilities.

“We’re at such a critical point in AI, where it’s imperative for our country and the national security to have a great industry-leading infrastructure to drive AI and HPC research inside the government,” AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman said on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.

AWS Secret and Top Secret are part of the company’s highly secure cloud capabilities for government agencies. These infrastructures provide secure and scalable cloud services for U.S. intelligence communities, the Department of Defense, federal agencies and defense industrial companies. Both maintain the accreditations needed to process highly sensitive classifications and maintain security compliance for those roles.

Amazon said the investment is aimed at supporting U.S. government priorities outlined in the recent AI Action Plan, which promotes the development of AI infrastructure and facilitates increased access to energy. Under the same plan, federal initiatives are being implemented to provide researchers with more compute infrastructure and technical resources to support U.S. dominance in the AI model race.

Transformation in the public sector depends heavily on how governments and cloud providers align, especially in AI policy and energy availability. Earlier this year, Shannon Kellogg, Amazon’s vice president of public policy for the Americas, stated that AWS has been making strategic investments in regions like North Carolina and Pennsylvania to capitalize on regulatory support and access to power. The company committed about $30 billion across both states.

Through the company’s expanded government AI and HPC infrastructure investments, federal agencies will gain access to AWS’ variety of AI services, including SageMaker AI for model training and customization and Bedrock for model and agent deployment. Advanced AI models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic PBC’s Claude, along with leading open-weight foundation models, will be available alongside AWS Trainium AI chips and Nvidia Corp.’s AI infrastructure.

Garnman said that using this infrastructure, federal customers and the supporting industrial base will be able to process massive datasets of global security data across hundreds of variables in record time. The availability of advanced computing will allow the acceleration of programs related to defense and intelligence workflows, reducing what traditionally takes weeks of manual analysis to just hours.

Government-supported industry missions, from national security to scientific research and innovation, will also benefit. This includes autonomous systems for cybersecurity, energy innovation and healthcare research.

“AI is going to help the government slim down, reduce costs and provide better service to our citizens,” added Garman. “So, I think it’s a win.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Garman about today’s announcement:

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