Amazonians like to think of their company as frugal—at least compared with many of their tech rivals. Forget the chocolatey treats and massages available to techies in Silicon Valley. At Amazon's home in Seattle, the most cherished freebies are bananas, distributed from a food truck in the courtyard. This parsimonious culture runs deep. In its heart the e-commerce giant has a shopkeeper's sense of thriftiness. Except every so often, when it throws caution to the wind and goes on a spending spree. It is on one now. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, calls it "Capexapalooza".

亚马逊人喜欢将自家公司视为节俭的典范——至少与众多科技竞争对手相比是这样。 忘掉硅谷为科技从业者提供的巧克力零食和按摩服务吧。 在亚马逊总部所在的西雅图，最受欢迎的免费福利是香蕉，这些香蕉由庭院中的餐车分发。 这种节俭文化根深蒂固。 在内心深处，这家电商巨头有着小店主般的节俭意识。 不过，每隔一段时间，它就会不顾一切，大肆挥霍一番。 如今，它正处在这样的阶段。 摩根大通银行将其称为“资本支出狂欢节”。

It's a historic gamble. No company has ever matched the $200bn of capital expenditures that Amazon has earmarked for this year, which is partly to be financed by blockbuster bond sales. It is mostly aimed at supporting Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud-computing arm, in the race to build artificial-intelligence infrastructure including data centres, chips and power. To add to the bill, Amazon has also said it will invest up to $50bn in OpenAI, which would be almost quadruple what Microsoft, its arch-rival, has committed to the maker of ChatGPT since 2019.

这是一场历史性的豪赌。 没有哪家公司能比得上亚马逊今年划拨的2000亿美元资本支出，其中部分资金将通过巨额债券发行来筹集。 这笔资金主要用于支持其云计算部门亚马逊网络服务（AWS），以在构建人工智能基础设施（包括数据中心、芯片和电力供应）的竞赛中占据优势。 此外，亚马逊还表示将向OpenAI投资高达500亿美元，这几乎是其竞争对手微软自2019年以来对ChatGPT制造商承诺投资额的四倍。

Amazon says that strong demand is driving its investments. AWS's sales grew at the fastest pace in more than three years last quarter, and despite $250bn of capex in the past three years, Andy Jassy, its CEO, said it is selling cloud capacity as fast as it is built.

亚马逊表示，强劲的需求是其投资的动力。 上季度，AWS的销售额增速达到三年多来的最高水平，尽管过去三年已投入2500亿美元的资本支出，但首席执行官安迪·贾西表示，AWS的云容量一经建成便迅速售罄。

Yet powerful competitive forces are also at play. Over the past 20 years AWS has been the pioneer of cloud computing, and a big provider of AI services. It is still leader of the pack but since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, its main cloud rivals, Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud, have grown much faster, chipping away at its lead. By doubling down on AI data centres, and seeking to loosen Microsoft's grip on OpenAI, Amazon looks determined to regain its stride.

然而，强大的竞争力量也在发挥作用。 过去20年里，AWS一直是云计算领域的先驱，也是人工智能服务的主要提供商。 它仍是行业领军者，但自2022年OpenAI推出ChatGPT以来，其主要云计算竞争对手微软的Azure和Alphabet的谷歌云增长迅猛，逐渐缩小了与AWS的差距。 通过加大对人工智能数据中心的投入，并试图削弱微软对OpenAI的控制，亚马逊决心重振雄风。

The company has a history of swinging for the fences. Back in 2015, Jeff Bezos, its founder, wrote with his inimitable nerdiness of the "truncated outcome distribution" of attempting to hit home runs. In baseball, the maximum payoff was four runs. In business, "every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs." That letter to shareholders was penned at the start of one spree that scored big time. In 2016-17 Amazon sharply increased spending on logistics and AWS, leading to several years of higher profit margins. But its next capex binge, during the covid-19 pandemic, was initially a bust, as it built far more warehouses than were needed. In 2023 Amazon curtailed spending just as Microsoft started to ramp it up in an anticipation of an AI bonanza. Since then it has been batting more aggressively.

这家公司向来有孤注一掷的传统。 早在2015年，创始人杰夫·贝索斯就以他独特的极客风格，写到了尝试本垒打时“结果分布的截断性”。 在棒球比赛中，最高得分是四分。 而在商业领域，“每隔一段时间，当你走上击球区时，你就能得到1000分。”他在致股东的信中这样写道。这封信是在一次大获成功的投资狂欢开始时写下的。 2016至2017年，亚马逊大幅增加了对物流和AWS的投入，随后几年利润大幅增长。 但其在新冠肺炎疫情期间的下一次资本支出狂欢却起初遭遇了失败，因为它建造的仓库远超实际需求。 2023年，就在微软开始加大投入以期待人工智能带来丰厚回报时，亚马逊却削减了支出。 从那以后，它的投资变得更加积极。

AWS has a few things in its favour. One is its sheer breadth of customers. Its burgeoning relationship with OpenAI adds to one with Anthropic, the lab behind Claude. Model-makers are among the biggest sources of cloud demand in the near term, using "gobs and gobs of compute", as Mr Jassy has put it. But with almost a third of the global market for cloud services, well ahead of Azure and Google Cloud, AWS has much to gain if companies beyond Silicon Valley start to embrace AI more fully. For now, many are still hesitant. But it will take at least 18 months to put this year's capex to operational use. By then it is possible that AI agents, which can reason in steps, use tools and work with other agents, will lead to a surge in enterprise spending.

AWS有几大优势。 一是其庞大的客户群体。 它与OpenAI日益紧密的关系，再加上与Claude背后的Anthropic实验室的合作，为其增添了砝码。 正如贾西所说，模型制造商是近期云计算需求最大的来源之一，它们“消耗了大量的计算能力”。 但AWS拥有全球近三分之一的云服务市场份额，远超Azure和谷歌云，如果硅谷以外的公司开始更全面地拥抱人工智能，AWS将大有可为。 目前，许多公司仍持观望态度。 但要将今年的资本支出投入运营使用，至少需要18个月的时间。 到那时，能够逐步推理、使用工具并与其他智能体协作的人工智能智能体可能会推动企业支出激增。

Working with both OpenAI and Anthropic will position it well for that moment. "The Everything Store" remains true to its name, with AWS now able to offer enterprise customers access to the two leading families of models, as well as numerous others, including its own, Nova. It also supports a variety of chips, including those of Nvidia and its cheaper in-house alternative, Trainium.

与OpenAI和Anthropic的合作，将使AWS为那一刻做好充分准备。 “万货商店”名副其实，AWS现在能够为企业客户提供两大领先模型家族以及其他众多模型（包括其自有的Nova模型）的访问权限。 它还支持多种芯片，包括英伟达的芯片及其更便宜的内部替代品Trainium。

Microsoft and Google offer variety, too. Azure provides models from OpenAI and Anthropic, as does Google, which also has its own top-tier model, Gemini, and chips called TPUs. But at a time when all hyperscalers say that demand for their AI services outstrips supply, Amazon's two rivals may find scarce computational resources harder to allocate to their cloud customers. That is because their other big businesses—Microsoft's Office products and Google's search—are more profitable than their cloud services, making them a more obvious priority for AI chips. With Amazon, things are different. The margins of Amazon.com are paltry compared with those of AWS, and it has a culture of doing a lot with little. Cloud customers may be more likely to come first.

微软和谷歌也提供多样化的选择。 Azure提供来自OpenAI和Anthropic的模型，谷歌也是如此，谷歌还有自己的顶级模型Gemini和名为TPU的芯片。 但在所有超大规模计算提供商都表示其人工智能服务需求超过供应的时候，亚马逊的这两家竞争对手可能会发现，将稀缺的计算资源分配给云客户变得更加困难。 这是因为它们的其他主要业务——微软的Office产品和谷歌的搜索业务——比云服务更赚钱，因此它们在分配人工智能芯片时，这些业务自然成为更明显的优先选择。 而亚马逊则不同。 与AWS相比，亚马逊网站的利润率微薄，而且它有着用少量资源做大事的文化。 云客户可能会更受重视。

Raising the Rufus

鲁弗斯的崛起

Wall Street has mixed feelings about Amazon's capex splurge. Although its shares have outperformed Microsoft's this year, they are still down by 10%, mostly because of doubts about the returns on its investments. In the short term, depreciation costs stemming from the new investments will rise before revenues from them start to flow. Brent Thill of Jefferies, a bank, says investors are also worried that the growing costs of AI infrastructure will weaken cloud margins even over the long term.

华尔街对亚马逊的资本支出狂欢看法不一。 尽管今年亚马逊的股价表现优于微软，但仍下跌了10%，这主要是因为对其投资回报的疑虑。 短期内，新投资带来的折旧成本将在收入开始流入之前上升。 杰富瑞银行的布伦特·希尔表示，投资者还担心，人工智能基础设施不断增长的成本甚至会长期削弱云业务的利润率。

Another source of worry is the rise of AI agents embedded in chatbots that can shop on a user's behalf. They could threaten Amazon's core business—bypassing Amazon.com or robbing it of relationships with customers and advertisers. Yet the company is better placed than its sceptics fear. Shortly after it struck its deal with OpenAI, the model-maker shelved plans to launch a shopping service called Instant Checkout. Rufus, Amazon's agentic-AI shopping assistant, helped generate $12bn of incremental annualised sales last year.

另一个令人担忧的问题是，嵌入聊天机器人的人工智能智能体能够代表用户购物。 这可能会威胁到亚马逊的核心业务——绕过亚马逊网站或剥夺其与客户和广告商的关系。 然而，该公司的情况比怀疑论者担心的要好。 在与OpenAI达成交易后不久，该模型制造商就搁置了推出名为Instant Checkout的购物服务的计划。 亚马逊的人工智能购物助手鲁弗斯去年帮助产生了120亿美元的年度增量销售额。

Other model-makers such as Google are muscling into e-commerce, but for now Amazon appears to be fending off the threat. By all means call the spending spree Capexapalooza. But that does not mean Amazon will end up a looza.

谷歌等其他模型制造商也在进军电子商务领域，但目前看来，亚马逊似乎正在抵御这一威胁。 尽管可以把这次支出狂欢称为“资本支出狂欢节”。 但这并不意味着亚马逊最终会成为输家。