Amazon spent $26.3 billion in capital expenditures during the fourth quarter of 2024, and that is “reasonably representative” of what it plans to spend each quarter of 2025, CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s Q4 earnings call on Thursday. The “vast majority” of that spending will reportedly go towards Amazon Web Services and AI development.
Thursday’s announcement comes amid a concerted push by nearly every major player in the AI space to invest heavily in AI in the new year. Earlier in the week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told investors that Google plans to spend about $75 billion in AI capital expenditures this year while Meta will likely spend between $60 billion and $65 billion. For its part, Microsoft has committed $80 billion to AI capital expenditures in 2025.
Amazon revealed in December that it is partnering with Anthropic, maker of the Claude large language model, to train the company’s next generation of LLMs on its newly released Trainium2 processors. To that end, Amazon is currently constructing a data center housing hundreds of thousands of the chips. Per Jassy, the company plans to reveal the Trainium2’s successor, Trainium3, later this year.
“We’re all learning from one another,” Jassy said of Amazon’s competition Thursday. “You have seen and will continue to see a lot of leapfrogging between us.”
These investments come as the American AI industry reels from DeepSeek’s release, an AI that offers comparable performance to OpenAI’s leading reasoning models for a fraction of the cost and energy requirements. While Amazon’s stock has risen 40% over the past year, its value slid 4% following Thursday’s earnings call.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.