Amazon has flagged multiple AI technology projects with spending overruns, according to the Financial Times, adding a cautionary data point to the narrative that Big Tech’s artificial intelligence arms race will pay for itself sooner rather than later.
The company, which has committed to roughly $200 billion in capital expenditures for 2026 focused on AI infrastructure, is discovering what happens when you hand powerful tools to tens of thousands of employees and say “go build.”
The AI tool overuse problem
Internal reports revealed that Amazon employees were overutilizing AI tools for non-essential tasks. The result was a substantial spike in token consumption, the unit of measurement for how much compute power AI models chew through, and with it, rising operational costs that leadership didn’t anticipate.
Amazon implemented an internal AI usage leaderboard called KiroRank. The leaderboard was later removed after concerns about gamification surfaced, with employees competing to rack up AI usage stats rather than focusing on whether that usage was actually productive.
Internal guidance has since been issued advising employees against performing AI tasks solely for the sake of using AI.
Reports have linked some production incidents to the misuse of AI coding tools.
The $200 billion question
Amazon’s first-quarter 2026 capital expenditures hit $43.2 billion, a pace that tracks toward its stated goal of deploying approximately $200 billion over the full year on data centers, networking infrastructure, and custom AI chip development.
Amazon’s share price declined following these spending announcements, reflecting investor anxiety about the gap between capital deployed and revenue returned. The situation points to potential financial strain as Amazon manages its free cash flow against this capital expenditure.