Each year, the European Commission publishes the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, an international compendium whose 2024 edition ranked 2,000 of the world’s top corporate spenders on research and development. Yet it consistently omits Amazon, arguably the single largest corporate R&D spender globally. Why? Because Amazon doesn’t explicitly report its R&D investment separately, instead grouping it into a broader “Technology and Content” category. Without clear data on Amazon’s precise R&D expenditures, the report can’t include the company—even though the European Commission itself estimates that Amazon’s actual R&D spending likely exceeds that of Alphabet, the Scoreboard’s current top spender.
It isn’t exactly a secret that the Seattle-based giant pours vast sums into innovation. Consider Amazon’s $10 billion bet on Project Kuiper, aiming to encircle the globe with internet satellites. Then there’s its $8 billion investment into Anthropic AI. The firm has an estimated $14 billion stake in the firm as of December 2024, according to Business Insider. And let’s not overlook its silent army of more than 750,000 robots and team of 16,000 robotics engineers, or the fact that this year, the company plans to spend $104 billion in capital expenditures.
A ‘pretty significant’ amount of R&D spending
We estimate that a considerable share of its capital expenditures are devoted to R&D — in the ballpark of $50 billion of its $59 billion in capex in 2022. For 2024, Amazon announced it expects to spend about $75 billion on capital expenditures – with “the majority of it for AWS.” CEO Andy Jassy noted that a “pretty significant amount” of AWS capital spend is going into large language model and AI-related investments (including training chips and expanded data centers).
In 2023, the company spent $48.1 billion on capital expenditures and another $77.7 billion in 2024. In its 10-k, the company notes that the “majority” of those sums support its AWS business unit and bolstering its fulfillment network.
Note: Unless otherwise noted, all granular R&D figures are estimates, and not official figures.
Decoding Amazon’s R&D spend
While Amazon’s R&D spending remains something of an enigma, there are clues in the forms of patents (the firm was granted 1,441 U.S. patents in 2024 and 1,591 a year earlier, according to IFI Claims, making it the 18th largest). But the company does not officially report R&D segment breakdowns or R&D employee count. Its “Technology and Content” (recently rebilled as “Technology and Infrastructure”) expense serves as its de facto R&D line. But it clearly spans more than research. The fact that Amazon has recently rebranded its “Technology and Content” spending as “Technology and Infrastructure” is telling. The label reflects the nature of these far-ranging expenses, which covers everything from technological “plumbing,” including costs for servers, networking equipment, data center depreciation, rent, and utilities, as well as infrastructure cost that support AWS and the broader business.
Amazon’s Technology & Content/Infrastructure operating expense was $73.2 billion in 2022 and $85.6 billion in 2023. In 2024, that figure was $88.5 billion. Of this amount, a significant portion—estimated at $16.6 billion in 2022, $18.9 billion in 2023, and $21.5 billion in 2024—goes toward content production for Prime Video and other media offerings, which most analysts exclude when estimating Amazon’s true R&D investment.
It is hard to complain when you have a multibillion-dollar annualized revenue run rate business in AI, like we do, and it’s growing triple-digit percentage year over year.
– Andy Jassy, CEO
The largest slice of Amazon’s R&D funding is likely dedicated to AWS and cloud infrastructure, including custom silicon development (Graviton, Trainium, and Inferentia chips) and data center upgrades. Another quarter of the budget (25% or roughly $15.3 billion) flows into AI and machine learning initiatives. The remainder is strategically allocated across robotics and automation (16%, $9.8 billion), e-commerce platform enhancements (12%, $7.3 billion), hardware supporting Amazon Alexa (which just got a refresh) and Fire TV (8%, $4.9 billion), and emerging technologies such as healthcare initiatives and Project Kuiper (4%, $2.4 billion).
While Amazon likely comes out on top in terms of overall R&D spend, Meta likely bests it in terms of R&D intensity with a range around 28–30% of its revenue.
How Amazon’s estimated R&D spending would stack up to peers
While AWS generates only about 16% of Amazon’s total revenue ($100B of $638B in 2024), it receives an estimated 35% of the company’s R&D funds. This dwarfs the innovation investments of its closest competitors; Amazon’s adjusted R&D spending alone ($61 billion) exceeds the combined R&D budgets of Microsoft ($27.2 billion) and Apple ($26.2 billion). Even Alphabet, the second-highest R&D spender, trails significantly at $48.4 billion. What’s particularly noteworthy is that while Amazon’s absolute spending towers over peers, its R&D intensity ratio (roughly 12-14% of revenue, not 9.6% as sometimes reported) actually aligns closely with Microsoft’s 13% and Alphabet’s 15%—suggesting that Amazon’s enormous spending isn’t disproportionate to its scale, but rather reflects its massive revenue base and long-term commitment to maintaining technological leadership across multiple domains.
Globally, we’re adding automation and robotics throughout our network.”
—Brian Olsavsky, CFO
Amazon’s R&D intensity appears to be steadily increasing over time, from approximately 10.9% in 2020 to the current 12–14% range as the company doubled down on cloud, AI, and other technological investments. This puts it in a middle ground among tech giants, with Apple’s R&D intensity remaining lower at around 7%, while Meta (Facebook) stands as an outlier with an exceptionally high R&D intensity of 20-30%—reflecting its massive bets on the metaverse and AI research.
Many observers point out that Amazon’s definition of “Technology and Content” has long included significant operational expenses—such as the cost of running AWS’s data centers—alongside true R&D. Still, the scale of Amazon’s investment means it almost certainly ranks among the largest corporate research organizations in the world, particularly given its high-profile initiatives spanning satellites, advanced AI chips, robotics, healthcare, and more.
A comparison of a variety of estimates
From Amazon’s most recent 10-K filing, the company offers some insight into its innovation priorities: “We expect spending in technology and infrastructure will increase over time… Our technology and infrastructure investment and capital spending projects often support a variety of product and service offerings due to geographic expansion and the cross-functionality of our systems and operations… We are investing in AWS… including compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning… We are also investing in… innovative and efficient software and electronic devices… including the development of a satellite network for global broadband service and autonomous vehicles for ride-hailing services.”
Amazon’s Zoox autonomous car [Image courtesy of Amazon]
“We expect spending in technology and infrastructure to increase over time as we add computer scientists, designers, software and hardware engineers, and merchandising employees.”
Given the immense scale and ambiguity of Amazon’s spending on innovation, it’s understandable why analysts often grapple with accurately quantifying the company’s R&D efforts. But one thing is clear: Amazon sees technology investment as foundational to its long-term strategy. In fact, the company’s latest 10-k filing underscores its belief in technology as a pillar of business growth: “We believe that advances in technology, specifically the speed and reduced cost of processing power, data storage and analytics, improved wireless connectivity, and the practical applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, will continue to improve users’ experience on the internet and increase its ubiquity in people’s lives.”
Peer benchmarking data
Method comparison (2024)
Note: The 9.87% estimate in the bottom of the table falls under what you would see in Amazon’s official filings. It was derived by calculating the average of several analysts’ estimates. When you take the entire “Technology and Infrastructure” figure and express it as a percentage of revenue, you get a value in the 12–14% range. Yet stripping out items not strictly related to the core research and development process, yields a figure closer to 10% of revenue.